Understanding the Disgust-Anger Confusion: Developmental Evidence from Children's Emotion Recognition

Basic Emotion Theory (BET) proposes that a limited set of biologically based emotions, including anger and disgust, are expressed through universal prototypical facial configurations. However, research suggests that disgust is amongst the least accurately recognized basic emotions and is frequently confused with anger. Although perceptual-attentional accounts suggest that disgust-anger confusion arises from shared visual features and failures of attention to diagnostic cues, little is known about how these mechanisms evolve during childhood. Two major explanations have been proposed: conceptual models (e.g. the Differentiation Model), and perceptual-attentional models, which emphasize the visual similarity between the two emotions. The present study examined these mechanisms by comparing recognition accuracy and gaze patterns in younger (3-5 years) and older (9-11 years) children. Participants viewed prototypical anger and disgust expressions and identified the displayed emotion while their eye movements were recorded. Across age groups, anger was recognized more accurately than disgust, and older children outperformed younger children specifically for disgust. Eye-movement analyses indicated that older children fixated longer on the eyes, whereas younger children distributed their attention more broadly across the face. Prototype-level results showed that expressions containing the mouth opening produced the highest rates of confusion, replicating patterns observed in adults. These findings suggest that persistent confusion between disgust and anger arises from both conceptual and perceptual-attentional limitations and that developmental improvements in visual selectivity support more accurate emotion recognition. The results contribute to theoretical models of emotion processing and may inform interventions aimed at strengthening children's socio-emotional skills.