Age-of-actor effects in body expression recognition of children

Investigations of developmental trajectories for emotion recognition suggest that both face- and body expression recognition increases rapidly in early childhood and reaches adult levels of performance near the age of ten. So far, little is known about whether children's ability to recognise body expressions is influenced by the age of the person they are observing. This question is investigated here by presenting 119 children and 42 young adults with videos of children, young adults and older adults expressing emotions with their whole body. The results revealed an own-age advantage for children, reflected in adult-level accuracy for videos of children for most expressions but reduced accuracy for videos of older adults. Children's recognition of older adults' expressions was not correlated with children's estimated amount of contact with older adults. Support for potential influences of social biases on performance measures was minimal. The own-age advantage was explained in terms of children's reduced familiarity with body expressions of older adults due to aging related changes in the kinematics characteristics of movements and potentially due to stronger embodiment of other children's bodily movements.