Ostracism modulates children's recognition of emotional facial expressions.

Ostracism has been shown to induce considerable physiological, behavioral and cognitive changes in adults. Previous research demonstrated its effects on children's cognitive and behavioral abilities, but less is known about its impact on their capacity to recognize subtle variations in social cues. The present study aimed at investigating whether social manipulations of inclusion and ostracism modulate emotion recognition abilities in children, and whether this modulation varies across childhood. To do so, 5- and 10-year-old children participated in a computer-based ball tossing game called Cyberball during which they were either included or ostracized. Then, they completed a facial emotion recognition task in which they were required to identify neutral facial expressions, or varying levels of intensity of angry and fearful facial expressions. Results indicated lower misidentification rates for children who were previously ostracized as compared to children who were previously included, both at 5 and 10 years of age. Moreover, when looking at children's accuracy and sensitivity to facial expressions, 5-year-olds' decoding abilities were affected by the social manipulation, while no difference between included and ostracized participants was observed for 10-year-olds. In particular, included and ostracized 10-year-old children as well as ostracized 5-year-olds showed higher accuracy and sensitivity for expressions of fear as compared to anger, while no such difference was observed for included 5-year-olds. Overall, the current study presents evidence that Cyberball-induced inclusion and ostracism modulate children's recognition of emotional faces.

Sequential learning of emotional faces is statistical at 12 months of age.

Infants are capable of extracting statistical regularities from continuous streams of elements, which helps them structuring their surrounding environment. The current study examines 12-month-olds' capacity to extract statistical information from a sequence of emotional faces. Using a familiarization procedure, infants were presented with videos of two actresses expressing the same facial emotion, and subsequently turning toward or away from each other. Videos displayed different emotions (i.e., anger, happiness, fear, sadness, surprise, amusement, disgust, and exasperation) and were organized sequentially, so that the transitional probabilities between videos were highly predictable in some cases, and less predictable in others. At test, infants discriminated highly predictable from low predictable transitional probabilities, suggesting that they extracted statistical regularities from the sequence of emotional faces. However, when examining the looking toward and the looking away conditions separately, infants showed evidence of statistical learning in the looking toward condition only. Together, these findings suggest that 12-month-old infants rely on statistical learning to segment a continuous sequence of emotional faces, although this ability can be modulated by the nature of the stimuli. The contribution of statistical learning to structure infants' social environment is discussed.