The development of emotion processing of body expressions from infancy to early childhood: A meta-analysis.

TY - JOUR

T1 - The development of emotion processing of body expressions from infancy to early childhood: A meta-analysis.

AU - Vuong, Quoc

AU - Geangu, Elena

N1 - This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for details

PY - 2023/4/11

Y1 - 2023/4/11

N2 - Body expressions provide important perceptual cues to recognize emotions in others. By adulthood, people are very good at using body expressions for emotion recognition. Thus an important research question is: How does emotion processing of body expressions develop, particularly during the critical first 2-years and into early childhood? To answer this question, we conducted a meta-analysis of developmental studies that use body stimuli to quantity infants’ and young children’s ability to discriminate and process emotions from body expressions at different ages. The evidence from our review converges on the finding that infantsand children can process emotion expressions across a wide variety of body stimuli and experimental paradigms, and that emotion-processing abilities do not vary with age. We discuss limitations and gaps in the literature in relation to a prominent view that infants learn to extract perceptual cues from different sources about people’s emotions under different environmental and social contexts, and suggest naturalistic approaches to further advance our understanding of the development of emotion processing of body expressions.

AB - Body expressions provide important perceptual cues to recognize emotions in others. By adulthood, people are very good at using body expressions for emotion recognition. Thus an important research question is: How does emotion processing of body expressions develop, particularly during the critical first 2-years and into early childhood? To answer this question, we conducted a meta-analysis of developmental studies that use body stimuli to quantity infants’ and young children’s ability to discriminate and process emotions from body expressions at different ages. The evidence from our review converges on the finding that infantsand children can process emotion expressions across a wide variety of body stimuli and experimental paradigms, and that emotion-processing abilities do not vary with age. We discuss limitations and gaps in the literature in relation to a prominent view that infants learn to extract perceptual cues from different sources about people’s emotions under different environmental and social contexts, and suggest naturalistic approaches to further advance our understanding of the development of emotion processing of body expressions.

KW - Emotion

KW - body expression

KW - development

KW - discrimination

KW - recognition

KW - meta-analysis

U2 - 10.3389/fcogn.2023.1155031

DO - 10.3389/fcogn.2023.1155031

M3 - Article

SN - 2813-4532

VL - 2

JO - Frontiers in Cognition

JF - Frontiers in Cognition

M1 - 1155031

ER -