This report discusses three studies of 2- to 5-year-old children's interpretations of facial expressions in terms of (1) the structure of the emotional domain and (2) prototypic example, overlap, and range of emotion categories. In the first study, 78 children were asked to make similarity judgments about 10 photographed facial expressions by…

Studies the dimensions of meaning attributed to facial expressions of emotion in preschoolers and adults. Subjects indicated the similarity or dissimilarity among different emotions by placing photographs of emotional facial expressions into preordained groups. For each age group, multidimensional scaling yielded a two-dimensional structure…