Sex differences of 40-, 52-, and 64-month-old children dased on pleasure-displeasure and arousal-sleep dimensions

This paper examines children’s emotional development with respect to sex in facial expression discrimination, based on the two-dimensional model of emotion. The study group consisted of 92 children, aged 40, 52, and 64 months. The participants were presented with 20 photos, which displayed 10 strong or weak facial expressions, pre-rated by adults on a nine-point scale in two dimensions. The children were required to identify such emotions. The experimental findings showed that the emotions of fear and sadness showed significant interactions between sex and age factors in the two-dimensional model, according to the respective ANOVA model (P < .05). Fear showed significant interactions between sex and age factors in both dimensions. Sadness showed significant interactions between sex and age in the arousal-sleep dimension. The research results show that females aged 40 - 64 months showed stronger arousal levels than males in recognizing the fear and sadness emotions, and sex differences in recognizing emotions declined up to adulthood. This study suggests that the two-dimensional model of emotion can reveal the potentially small effects of sex on children’s facial expression discrimination, and is a useful tool for representing sex differences between groups with respect to emotional discrimination for preschoolers.