Children's ability to accurately recognize the external emotional signals produced by those around them represents a milestone in their socioemotional development and is associated with a number of important psychosocial outcomes. A plethora of individual studies have examined when, and in which order, children acquire emotion knowledge over the course of their development. Yet, very few attempts have been made to summarize this body of work quantitatively. To address this, the present meta-analysis examined the age-related trajectories of emotion recognition across childhood and the extent to which typically developing children's recognition of external emotional cues (in the face, voice, and body) is influenced by a host of participant-, task-, and stimulus-related factors. We analyzed children's emotion recognition overall (independent of specific emotion categories) and for specific basic emotions. In total, k = 129 individual studies, investigating a total of N = 31,101 2-12-year-old children's emotion recognition abilities were included in our analyses. Children's recognition accuracy across all emotion categories was significantly above chance and improved with age in the same manner for all emotions. Emotion recognition accuracy was also moderated by region of study and task type. The order in which children became proficient at identifying specific emotions was consistent with previous qualitative reviews: Happiness was the easiest emotion to recognize, and disgust and fear were the most difficult to recognize across age. Task- and stimulus-related moderator variables also influenced specific emotion categories in different ways. We contextualize these results with regard to children's socioemotional development more broadly, and we discuss how our findings can be used to guide researchers and practitioners interested in children's social skills. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

---

童年时期情绪识别的年龄相关变化：荟萃分析评价。


儿童准确识别周围人产生的外部情绪信号的能力代表了他们社会情感发展的一个里程碑，并与许多重要的社会心理结果有关。大量的个人研究考察了儿童在发展过程中何时以及以何种顺序获得情感知识。然而，很少有人尝试定量地总结这项工作。为了解决这个问题，本荟萃分析研究了童年时期与年龄相关的情绪识别轨迹，以及通常发展中的儿童对外部情绪线索（面部、声音和身体）的识别在多大程度上受到一系列参与者、任务和刺激相关因素的影响。我们分析了儿童的整体情绪识别 （独立于特定的情绪类别） 和特定的基本情绪。我们的分析总共包括 k = 129 项单独的研究，共调查了 N = 31,101 名 2-12 岁儿童的情绪识别能力。儿童在所有情绪类别中的识别准确性都显著高于偶然性，并且随着年龄的增长，所有情绪的识别准确性都以相同的方式提高。情绪识别准确性也受到研究领域和任务类型的调节。儿童熟练识别特定情绪的顺序与之前的定性评价一致：快乐是最容易识别的情绪，而厌恶和恐惧是各个年龄段最难识别的情绪。与任务和刺激相关的调节变量也以不同的方式影响特定的情绪类别。 我们将这些结果更广泛地与儿童的社会情感发展联系起来，并讨论如何使用我们的发现来指导对儿童社交技能感兴趣的研究人员和从业者。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 （c） 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。