The Development Of Micro-expression Recognition Ability Of 4-6 Years Old Children

Infancy is the critical period in children's rapid development of emotion comprehension, in which children paves the way for future achievement of many important social contact abilities through identifying and understand others' emotion. In social life, distinguishing other person's emotion quickly and accurately and responding actively is beneficial to an individual's existence and development. Using pictures of expression to study children's identification and comprehension is the main approach to the research of their cognition of emotion. It has been confirmed that infants' ability to predict others' psychological state derives from spotting their facial expressions; however, it is often the case that adults employ micro-expressions to conceal their true feelings. Researchers from abroad and home to a large degree employ static facial expressions, cartoon expressions, or brief strokes etc. to investigate children's ability to discern facial expressions. As a novel emotion scaling tool, however, micro-expression has not been utilized in this kind of study yet. For those studies using micro-expressions, the subjects mostly are middle school and college students and adults, thus leaving a gap in the study of pre-school children's identification of micro-expressions.Using pictures of micro-expression as experiment material, this study investigates the identification of micro-expressions ability in children between 4-6 years old. Meanwhile, the developmental feature and typological differences of their abilities have been discussed as well. Based on these, this study, employing the training tool of micro-expression, further explores the function of training toward the identification ability. The final findings are the following:(1) With the growth of their age, children between 4-6 years old improve the ability to distinguish the four basic micro-expressions, viz-a-viz, happy, angry, sad and fear. The order of identification from the highest to the lowest is happy> angry> sad, fear. What's more, there's no difference between boys and girls.(2) There exists obvious discrepancy in terms of their age. The vital age to discern happy micro-expression is 5 years old, angry and sad 6 years old, but the fear micro-expression is not 4-6 years old.(3) The training tools' utilization can effectively improve children's ability to identify micro-expression, and through training 4 and 5-year old children can reach that level of 6-year-old.