Developmental trajectories and socioemotional correlates of emotion recognition in vocal bursts in early childhood.

Abstract

Emotion recognition, one key aspect of emotion reasoning, is crucial to socioemotional development in childhood. While much developmental research has focused on facial emotion recognition, studies on the recognition of emotions conveyed through vocal bursts remain relatively scarce, despite the voice being one of the primary channels for conveying emotion. To address this gap, we investigated (a) how recognition accuracy across six well-studied emotions in vocal bursts changes between the ages of 5 and 8 (N = 162, 47.53% girls and 52.47% boys), (b) whether gender moderates the developmental trajectories of recognition accuracy (both overall and at the level of distinct emotions), and (c) whether recognition accuracy predicts socioemotional functioning concurrently and longitudinally. Our findings revealed that recognition accuracy was highest for happiness and lowest for fear and that accuracy improved with age for all emotions except for happiness, which was positively associated with age at a marginal level. While younger girls (compared with boys) were better at recognizing emotions, this difference disappeared by age 8. This same pattern was observed for sadness and anger at the level of distinct emotions. The capacity to recognize emotion in vocal bursts did not correlate with caregivers' perceptions of children's emotional symptoms or hyperactivity. However, it predicted a lower likelihood of conduct problems and a higher tendency toward prosocial behavior concurrently, with the latter effect staying significant longitudinally. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of emotion recognition beyond the face and its implications for children's socioemotional adjustment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).