Introduction: Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) is a crucial skill in day-to-day life. Deficits in FER can impair communication, social cognition, and interpersonal relations, leading to social isolation. Most studies have used photographs of facial expressions from various databases. At early developmental stages, photographic expressions may not optimally support emotion understanding due to the complexity of facial features. Caricature is an art form that magnifies physical features to capture their essence. However, facial expression studies using caricatures remain underexplored.
Purpose: This study examines how children, adolescents, and young adults recognize emotions, rate their intensity, and reaction time when viewing facial expressions in photographs compared to caricatures.
Method: In study one, A total of 132 photographs portraying basic emotional expressions were presented to two groups of participants (n = 369 and n = 310), in both photographic and caricature formats, each displayed for 5 seconds. The dependent measures included response accuracy, reaction time, and perceived intensity of the expressions.
Results: The findings indicate that recognition accuracy was significantly greater for caricatures (M = 62.7%, SD = 10%) compared to photographs (M = 54.4%, SD = 7.2%), F(1, 677) = 153.084, p < .001. Across age groups, accuracy remained consistently higher for caricatures. Reaction times were significantly shorter for caricatures (M = 1.83, SD = 1.1) than for photographs (M = 2.5, SD = 1.26). Although mean intensity ratings were higher for caricatures, the difference did not reach statistical significance.
Conclusion: Results suggest caricature-based expressions may offer a practical and engaging alternative to traditional photographic stimuli, especially for younger populations in educational settings, social-emotional learning programs, and psychological assessment. and in intervention contexts that require greater emotional clarity.