This stage of development involves the child still mastering tasks as opposed to adults who are in the Formal Operational Period, which involves mastery being obtained. This information suggests that adults should be able to perform better than children when it comes to detecting emotions but this is not supported by the findings of the Baron-Cohen paper, which leads us to believe that children have the same mental ability as adults when it comes to emotion detection. .
The paintings used in this experiment were by Hockney a contemporary English artist and Valazquez seventeenth century Spanish artist. The paintings were both transformed into black and white to alleviate bias caused by colour .
In this experiment, the aim was to determine if there was a difference in the ability of a child in the Concrete Operational Period of Development and an adult in the Formal Operational Period. This was done by showing pictures of faces displaying different emotions and seeing whether the subject could correctly name the emotion portrayed. .
The possibly results of the experiment would be that adults and children both performed to the same or similar ability or adults performed better than children or that children performed better than adults at recognizing emotion from faces. It was hypothesized that age would have no affect on the ability to perceive emotions as the ability to perceive and recognize emotion develops early in childhood and does not need to be mastered to work sufficiently. Alternatively if adults were shown to be able to recognize emotions more affectively it could be said that mastery is necessary for the ability to recognize emotions. If children were found to have better emotion perceiving skills both of these theories would be irrelevant. .
Method.
Participants.
The experiment consisted of five groups (eight year olds, nine year olds, 10 year olds, 11 year olds and adults (Psychology 100 students from two lab classes) The total number of participants altogether was 145, 23 eight year olds, 25 nine year olds, 33 10 year olds, 29 11 year olds and 35 adults.
