Emotion recognition is a critical skill for children's socioemotional development, linked to several positive outcomes such as academic success, social adjustment, and self-confidence. The ability to recognize emotions emerges early in development. While many studies have explored how children learn to identify emotions, few have systematically analyzed this extensive body of research.

In this study recently published in Psychological Bulletin, the authors review 129 studies on children's recognition of basic emotions (e.g., happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust). With data from over 30,000 participants, the study maps the development of emotion recognition skills and examines key methodological factors that may influence outcomes in these tasks. Consistent with previous qualitative reviews, the findings show that children's ability to recognize emotions improves with age and exceeds chance levels across all emotions. However, task design significantly impacted performance. For example, children struggled more with tasks that required matching faces based on perceptual features (e.g., "Pick the face that looks like this example") compared to tasks that involved labeling emotions (e.g., "Pick the face that looks happy"). Finally, the order that children became proficient in recognizing emotions was also broadly consistent with previous works: Happiness was the easiest emotion to recognize, while fear and disgust were the most difficult.

These findings highlight the importance of considering age, task design, and stimulus characteristics when developing emotion recognition tasks for children or using such tasks to predict other developmental outcomes.