Past research has shown that children recognize emotions from facial expressions poorly and improve only gradually with age, but the stimuli in such studies have been static faces. Because dynamic faces include more information, it may well be that children more readily recognize emotions from dynamic facial expressions. The current study of…

In prior research, preschoolers were surprisingly poor at naming the emotion purportedly signaled by prototypical facial expressions--when shown as static images. To determine whether this poor performance is due to the use of static stimuli, rather than dynamic, we presented preschoolers (3-5 years) with facial expressions as either static images…