Assessing Complex Emotion Recognition in Children. A Preliminary Study of the CAM-C: Argentine Version

Abstract

Facial emotion recognition is one of the psychological processes of social cognition that begins during the first year of life, though the accuracy and speed of emotion recognition improves throughout childhood. The objective of this study was to carry out a preliminary study for the adaptation and validation of the CAM-C FACE test in Argentine children from 9 to 14 years old, by measuring hit rates and reaction times. The results of this study show that the unidimensional model is more appropriate when assessing the speed of performance (reaction times), with a satisfactory reliability (ρ = .950). Results also indicated that girls presented more correct answers compared to boys, while boys had longer reaction times. In addition, the group of children from 12 to 14 years old presented more correct answers compared to the group from 9 to 11 years old, while no differences were observed between groups in terms of reaction times.

Keywords

• facial emotion recognition
• cam-c test
• psychometric properties
• spanish-speaking population