16/07/2025
🎓On the lead up to our closure, we wanted to take the opportunity to celebrate our students’ achievements by sharing the key findings from their dissertation projects.
👩🏻🎓Caitlyn Swanick was interested in how individual differences influence children's facial scanning pattern in relation to emotion perception.
⚠️Although the project began with the aim to explore individual differences (s*x and neurodiversity), the low sample size and uneven group sizes meant that we were unable to perform any analyses exploring individual differences. This is normal considering the timeframe of the ambitious project ☺️.
📈The general findings showed that preschool children can accurately recognise happy faces followed by sad and angry faces. They were less likely to recognise neutral and scared faces.
📉When viewing happy and sad faces, children tend to scan around the mouth region. And when viewing scared and angry faces (otherwise known as threat-based emotions), they tend to scan around the eye region. This is in contrast to the adult literature demonstrating the tendency to avoid threat-based eyes. The finding suggests that preschool children have not yet developed an avoidance of threat-based eyes and were prioritising on the most salient features when considering emotion accuracy.
💖We would like to thank all participating children and parents for their contribution to this project!
