TY - JOUR
T1 - Pubertal development shapes perception of complex facial expressions
AU - Motta-Mena, Natalie V.
AU - Scherf, K. Suzanne
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Social Science Research Institute and the Department of Psychology at the Pennsylvania State University as well as a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation to NVMM (# DGE1255832). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. We thank Dr Elizabeth A. Shirtcliff for providing the script and helping to compute the pubertal composite scores. We are also grateful to Giorgia Picci, Dr Elisabeth Whyte, Daniel Elbich, and Sara Barth for assisting in the data collection. Finally, we thank our research study families for making this research possible.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
PY - 2017/7
Y1 - 2017/7
N2 - We previously hypothesized that pubertal development shapes the emergence of new components of face processing (Scherf et al., 2012; Garcia & Scherf, 2015). Here, we evaluate this hypothesis by investigating emerging perceptual sensitivity to complex versus basic facial expressions across pubertal development. We tested pre-pubescent children (6–8 years), age- and sex-matched adolescents in early and later stages of pubertal development (11–14 years), and sexually mature adults (18–24 years). Using a perceptual staircase procedure, participants made visual discriminations of both socially complex expressions (sexual interest, contempt) that are arguably relevant to emerging peer-oriented relationships of adolescence, and basic (happy, anger) expressions that are important even in early infancy. Only sensitivity to detect complex expressions improved as a function of pubertal development. The ability to perceive these expressions is adult-like by late puberty when adolescents become sexually mature. This pattern of results provides the first evidence that pubertal development specifically influences emerging affective components of face perception in adolescence.
AB - We previously hypothesized that pubertal development shapes the emergence of new components of face processing (Scherf et al., 2012; Garcia & Scherf, 2015). Here, we evaluate this hypothesis by investigating emerging perceptual sensitivity to complex versus basic facial expressions across pubertal development. We tested pre-pubescent children (6–8 years), age- and sex-matched adolescents in early and later stages of pubertal development (11–14 years), and sexually mature adults (18–24 years). Using a perceptual staircase procedure, participants made visual discriminations of both socially complex expressions (sexual interest, contempt) that are arguably relevant to emerging peer-oriented relationships of adolescence, and basic (happy, anger) expressions that are important even in early infancy. Only sensitivity to detect complex expressions improved as a function of pubertal development. The ability to perceive these expressions is adult-like by late puberty when adolescents become sexually mature. This pattern of results provides the first evidence that pubertal development specifically influences emerging affective components of face perception in adolescence.
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U2 - 10.1111/desc.12451
DO - 10.1111/desc.12451
M3 - Article
C2 - 27321445
AN - SCOPUS:84976894789
VL - 20
JO - Developmental Science
JF - Developmental Science
SN - 1363-755X
IS - 4
M1 - e12451
ER -