Subjective ratings and emotional recognition of children's facial expressions from the CAFE set

PLoS One. 2018 Dec 27;13(12):e0209644. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0209644. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

Access to validated stimuli depicting children's facial expressions is useful for different research domains (e.g., developmental, cognitive or social psychology). Yet, such databases are scarce in comparison to others portraying adult models, and validation procedures are typically restricted to emotional recognition accuracy. This work presents subjective ratings for a sub-set of 283 photographs selected from the Child Affective Facial Expression set (CAFE [1]). Extending beyond the original emotion recognition accuracy norms [2], our main goal was to validate this database across eight subjective dimensions related to the model (e.g., attractiveness, familiarity) or the specific facial expression (e.g., intensity, genuineness), using a sample from a different nationality (N = 450 Portuguese participants). We also assessed emotion recognition (forced-choice task with seven options: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise and neutral). Overall results show that most photographs were rated as highly clear, genuine and intense facial expressions. The models were rated as both moderately familiar and likely to belong to the in-group, obtaining high attractiveness and arousal ratings. Results also showed that, similarly to the original study, the facial expressions were accurately recognized. Normative and raw data are available as supplementary material at https://osf.io/mjqfx/.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Adult
  • Age Factors
  • Aged
  • Aged, 80 and over
  • Analysis of Variance
  • Arousal
  • Child
  • Child, Preschool
  • Databases, Factual
  • Emotions*
  • Facial Expression*
  • Facial Recognition*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Infant
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Photic Stimulation
  • Young Adult

Grants and funding

Part of this research was funded by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia with grants awarded to MVG (PTDC/MHC-PCN/5217/2014), CC (SFRH/BD/99875/2014), and DLR (SFRH/BPD/73528/2010), and by a Marie Curie fellowship (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-CIG/631673) awarded to MVG. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation, or preparation of the manuscript. There was no additional external funding received for this study.