TALK: Talk: Amy Dawel (ANU) - Integration of dangerous context and fearful expressions in children and adults: Gaze-cueing and threat bias effects

In real life, we use contextual information from the environment to help us interpret the emotions signaled by others’ facial expressions. Yet, because emotion perception has often been studied using facial expressions in isolation, we know little about how this important social skill develops. This talk presents data that explores to what extent children (8-12 years) show early and mandatory integration of context and expression information, in a non-predictive gaze-cueing paradigm. Briefly, children and adults decided whether animals that were looked-at (or away from) by fearful and happy faces were safe or dangerous. The animal stimuli and required response (i.e., safe vs. dangerous) were designed to invoke a potentially threatening environmental context, meaning that fearful expressions were more relevant in this context than happy expressions. Integration of context and expression was measured as (a) greater gaze-cueing from fearful expressions than from happy expressions, and (b) facilitation of responses by fearful expressions to dangerous animals versus safe animals. Results indicate that 8 to 12 year old children do have some capacity for early and mandatory integration of context and expression, which can drive shifts in attention and behavioural responses. This capacity however seems to decline rapidly as processing becomes more volitional (i.e., at longer SOA duration). The difficulties children show with integrating context and expression in later volitional stages of processing may contribute to errors in emotion perception and, thus, less adaptive social responses.