Modality dominance in the perception of incongruent bimodal emotion expressions

We report a preliminary investigation of how perception of congruent and incongruent visual and auditory cues of emotion changes from early childhood to adulthood. Research has shown that for speech perception, children prefer auditory cues whereas adults prefer visual cues. Forty listeners participated, ten in each of the following age groups: preschool, school-aged, early adolescents, and adults. Participants were exposed to a total of 184 semantically neutral sentences (60 congruent visual- auditory) portrayed by one male and female speaker with happy, sad, angry, or fearful emotional expressions. As expected, increased accuracy in identifying the emotion portrayed was seen for congruent stimuli in comparison to incongruent stimuli. Although a clear auditory dominance by preschool children was not indicated, they produced significantly fewer visually- based responses for incongruent visual-auditory signals compared to older children and adults. Explanation for this may include a difference in the salience of visual versus auditory emotion cues for this age group, the limited number of emotion categories included in the current study, and small participant groups.