Expressive Communication in Families: Familiarity and Accuracy in an Interactive Emotion Recognition Task

Abstract

The ability to communicate emotion is fundamental to social communication. This skill develops during childhood and through early interactions with parents and siblings. Across two studies, we examined children’s recognition of emotional expressions when interacting with family members. Families participated together and took turns producing facial expressions in response to emotionally evocative objects while their partner attempted to guess the object that caused the expression. Study 1 (N = 45 parent-child dyads) examined whether parents and children recognised each other’s expressions more accurately than unfamiliar adults. Parents showed a clear familiarity advantage when judging their children’s expressions, outperforming naïve adults, and naïve parents of similarly aged children. Children showed comparable accuracy when judging familiar versus unfamiliar adults, suggesting that children’s expressive clarity, not perceiver type, constrains performance in this age range. Study 2 extended this work to sibling pairs (N = 45) to test whether familiarity advantages generalise beyond parent-child relationships. Children completed the task with their own sibling and then watched videos of age-matched unfamiliar children completing the same task. Again, children demonstrated a familiarity effect: siblings were more accurate when interpreting each other’s expressions compared to those of unfamiliar children. Accuracy increased with the age of the expresser, suggesting developmental improvements in expressive clarity, whereas the age gap between siblings played no role. Siblings also completed the task with their parents, replicating the same familiarity effect found between children and parents in Study 1. Together, these studies demonstrate that emotion recognition is strongly shaped by familiarity, not just parental expertise. Siblings, like parents, show heightened sensitivity to each other’s expressive behaviour, underscoring the broader role of family relationships in the development of emotion understanding.

Presented at the International Society for Research on Emotion Conference 2026.

Citation: Palmer, K., Kohler, M., & Nelson, N. (2026). Expressive Communication in Families: Familiarity and Accuracy in an Interactive Emotion Recognition Task. Oral presentation at International Society for Research on Emotion Conference 2026. Brisbane, Australia.

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