Parent-Child Emotion Recognition: the role of familiarity in interactive contexts

Abstract

The ability to express and understand emotion is fundamental to social communication, and this skill develops during childhood and through early interactions with parents. Across two studies, we examined how well parents and children recognise emotional expressions when interacting with each other and with unfamiliar parents and children, to determine whether familiarity affects recognition ability. Parents and children took turns producing facial expressions in response to emotionally evocative objects while their partner attempted to guess the object seen. Study 1 provided initial evidence for a familiarity effect, showing that parents were significantly better than naïve adults at recognising their child’s expressions during the expression identification game. Study 2 extended these findings by testing whether this advantage was specific to their own child and whether children also performed better with their parent. To examine this, participants completed the same task but also watched videos of unfamiliar parents and children. Parent-child dyads were more accurate together than when judging unfamiliar individuals. Interestingly, across both studies, children’s ability to produce and interpret expressions did not significantly improve with age. These findings highlight the role of familiarity in emotion recognition and the need for further research investigating how emotion knowledge is socialized in early development, and contributes to overall emotional development.

Presented at the joint meeting of the Australasian Experimental Psychology Conference (EPC) and Asia Pacific Conference on Vision (APCV).

Citation: Palmer, K., Buttle, H. M., Kohler, M., Fong, F. T. K., & Nelson, N. L. (2025). Parent-Child Emotion Recognition: the role of familiarity in interactive contexts. Oral presentation at joint meeting of Australasian Experimental Psychology Conference (EPC) and Asia Pacific Conference on Vision (APCV). Sydney, NSW, Australia.

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