Parent-Child Facial Expression Recognition: The Role of Familiarity in Interactive Contexts

The ability to express and understand emotion is fundamental to social communication, and develops through early parent-child interactions. Across two studies, we examined parents’ and children’s recognition of emotional expressions during a structured interactive task. In Study 1, parent-child dyads (N = 33, children aged 4-9 years) took turns producing facial expressions in response to emotion-eliciting objects while their partner guessed the eliciting object. Videos of children were shown to naïve adult raters (N = 88) completing the same task. Study 1 provided initial evidence for a familiarity effect, with parents outperforming naïve raters at recognising their child’s expressions. Study 2 (N = 45 dyads, children aged 4-12 years) extended this by testing whether recognition accuracy reflects familiarity with a specific partner or general parenting experience. Participants completed the task with each other and with videos of unfamiliar partners. Naïve parents (N = 69) and non-parents (N = 68) also rated the children’s expressions. Study 2 confirmed a bidirectional familiarity advantage: both parents and children were more accurate with their familiar partner than with unfamiliar individuals, suggesting the effect is specific to the parent-child relationship rather than reflecting a general ability to read adult or child faces. Recognition accuracy was not strongly predicted by age, suggesting familiarity may account for more variance in performance than developmental changes in expressive clarity alone. These findings support the view that the unique parent-child bond plays a meaningful role in emotional understanding.

Recommended citation: Palmer, K., Buttle, H.M., Kohler, M., Fong, F.T.K., Nelson, N., "Parent-Child Facial Expression Recognition: The Role of Familiarity in Interactive Contexts." Available at SSRN: https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7646042 (2026)
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