Critical Review of Brechet et al. (2009). How does Sam feel?: Children’s labelling and drawing of basic emotions
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Introduction
Children's understanding of emotions contributes to their cognitive development and interpersonal relationship. The development of ability to identify basic emotions by children has been tested by different tasks. According to type of task the recognition of emotion was tested using facial expressions, scenarios describing the situations or drawing a person or face expressing basic emotions (Camras & Allison, 1985; Widen & Rusell, 2003; Picard et al., 2007).
The children comprehension of emotions was tested on children as young as 2 years old (Widen & Rusell, 2003) and in addition
present in happiness, ghost in fear) and the drawings were accepted as correct. This finding indicated that even if the tasks were not presented at the same time the second task was presented immediately after the first one which could influence the results in the second task. This is consistent with Harrigan (1984) findings but it is contradicting with Reichenbach and Masters (1983) study. The future experiment could use between-subject design where participants would not be influenced by the first task and possible replication of strategy would not occur (Picard et al., 2007).
Neutral drawings were analysed separately and neutral scenario was not used in the labelling task, so there would be no possibility for comparison which leads to a question how this analyses would contribute to support experimenters’ hypothesis. Additionally the results interpreted by researchers stated that the neutral drawing are stable up to the age of 9 and from 10 years of age to adulthood the number of correct drawings increased, however looking at the results the number of correct drawings seem to be stable from 6 to 11 year olds where 6 to 11 answers were correct out of 24 and it clearly increased in adulthood where 19 from 24 answers were correct. In the future study the neutral