The developmental changes in emotion recognition from human biological motion by children aged from 4 to 12 years

Most research on the development of emotion recognition has focused on facial expressions, leaving a relative gap in our understanding of how children interpret emotions through body movements. This study examined developmental changes in the ability to recognize basic emotions (joy, anger, fear, and sadness) from human biological motion presented in point-light displays (HBM-PLDs), with particular attention to how these changes vary depending on the type of emotion and age. One hundred twenty-eight preschool and primary school children aged 4-12 years participated in two experimental tasks involving the explicit recognition of emotions from HBM-PLDs. The results highlight a clear developmental progression in the recognition of emotions from HBM-PLDs with increasing age. This developmental change appears to follow a curvilinear trajectory, with an inflection point around 8.5 years of age (100 months). However, the study further reveals that this inflection point differs depending on the specific discrete emotion considered. Joy seems to be recognized as early as age 4, followed by anger between ages 5 and 6, sadness between ages 6 and 7.5, and finally fear after age 9-10. This represents an important contribution, demonstrating that the improvement in emotion recognition from body movement is not homogeneous but modulated according to the discrete emotion. These findings support the idea that the development of discrete emotion recognition is independent of the modality of presentation (facial expressions, body movements, vocal cues, etc.) and suggest that emotion recognition may rely on a modality-independent and unified developmental process. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).