Wired for sound? Do children show auditory dominance when determining the emotions of others?

Supervised by: Dr Paddy Ross, Department of psychology, Durham University

Project Background

Emotion recognition is a function of multi-modal sensory input; visual and auditory information are combined to produce a unified percept. Congruency of information between these channels facilitates emotion recognition, however incongruence between visual and auditory information is not uncommon; for example, in the case of sarcasm, irony, insincerity, or the suppression of an emotional response. In these cases, visual cues such as body language and facial expression will often contradict prosodic information, and judgement must be made on which cue to attend to. Which we pay attention to may be dictated by sensory dominance: a phenomenon where inputs from one sensory modality are preferentially processed over others that are co-occurring, often in the context of incongruent information. Early work around sensory dominance by Colavita (1974) found visual stimuli to be preferentially processed in adults, using a simple stimulus discrimination task. Subsequent research into the Colavita effect cemented its credibility across a range of conditions.

Children, on the other hand, appear to exhibit a reverse Colavita effect: they preferentially process auditory stimuli. Research using children shows an early predisposition towards auditory stimuli, that carries on into school age.

The interplay between sensory dominance and affective cues in emotion recognition is an emerging area of interest. Emotion recognition seems to centre around facial and bodily expressions in adults, corresponding with the apparent visual dominance adults show in the literature. Children, on the other hand, seem to attend to vocal cues instead. Building on the work of Ross et al (2021), and Ross et al (2023), we aim to investigate whether children's judgement of a person's emotions will be affected more by audio or visual cues. Our focus is to create realistic stimuli that reflect real life expressions of emotion to ascertain the level of auditory reliance in children who are asked to make a judgement on which emotion is being displayed. From this, we aim to produce a journal article for publication.