Are today’s children good at reading facial emotions?

In a recent study, researchers tried to find whether children today, who have grown up with mobile technology from birth, are worse at reading emotions and picking up cues from people’s faces than children who didn’t grow up with tablets and smartphones. The result suggests that today’s kids are all right.

Infancy and early childhood are critical developmental phases during which children learn to interpret important non-verbal cues such as facial expressions, tone of voice and gestures.

But with the ubiquitous use of tablets and other devices today – among toddlers, as well as their caregivers – the psychologists wanted to know: Have younger children missed the opportunity to understand these cues? The study tested the ability of more than 50 sixth graders in 2017, and more than 50 sixth graders in 2012 – both male and female, from the same

Southern California public school – to correctly identify emotions in photographs and videos. Most children from the sixth-grade class of 2012 were born in 2001, while the first iPhone came out in 2007, for example, and the first iPad in 2010 – a time when the sixth graders from the 2017 class were infants and toddlers.

The psychologists found that the 2017 sixth-graders scored 40 per cent higher than the 2012 class at correctly identifying emotions in photographs and made significantly fewer errors than the 2012 students. In addition, the 2017 students were better at identifying the emotions in a series of videos, but only slightly better, a difference the researchers said is not statistically significant.

“At a time when so many people are communicating through screens, I hope our findings give parents some peace of mind that kids seem to be able to learn to read social cues in photos,” said lead author Yalda T. Uhls, a UCLA adjunct assistant professor of psychology and founder and executive director of the UCLA-based Center for Scholars and Storytellers.

–ANI