Test-retest reliability of the facial expression labeling task

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Psychopathology Research
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Recognizing emotional expressions is crucial for socioemotional development.
• Impaired emotion recognition is linked to various psychiatric disorders.
• Reliability of emotion identification tasks is needed for developmental psychopathology research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess the test-retest reliability of the facial expression labeling task (FELT) scores.
• To evaluate FELT components as potential transdiagnostic endophenotypes.
• To inform future research on socioemotional development and child psychopathology.

Main Methods:

• Tested 157 twin children (ages 9-14) using the FELT twice, 2-5 weeks apart.
• Participants identified emotions on faces morphed with neutral expressions at 10 intensity levels.
• Analyzed reliability using Pearson correlation coefficients.

Main Results:

• The FELT demonstrated strong test-retest reliability across all tested emotions.
• Scores showed high reliability for estimating overall ability (intercepts) and improvement (slopes).
• Pearson r values for intercepts ranged from 0.76-0.85, and for slopes from 0.69-0.83.

Conclusions:

• The FELT is a reliable tool for assessing emotion recognition in children.
• High reliability supports using FELT data in latent growth curve models.
• Findings support FELT's utility in developmental research and identifying endophenotypes for psychopathology.