A facial expression of pax: Assessing children’s ‘‘recognition’’ of emotion from faces Nicole L. Nelson a,⇑ , James A. Russell b a School of Psychology, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia b Department of Psychology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA article info Article history: Received 3 September 2014 Revised 27 July 2015 Available online 27 August 2015 Keywords: Facial expressions Emotion Jealousy Fear Children Process of elimination abstract In a classic study, children were shown an array of facial expres- sions and asked to choose the person who expressed a specific emo- tion. Children were later asked to name the emotion in the face with any label they wanted. Subsequent research often relied on the same two tasks—choice from array and free labeling—to support the conclusion that children recognize basic emotions from facial expressions. Here five studies (N = 120, 2- to 10-year-olds) showed that these two tasks produce illusory recognition; a novel nonsense facial expression was included in the array. Children ‘‘recognized’’ a nonsense emotion (pax or tolen) and two familiar emotions (fear and jealousy) from the same nonsense face. Children likely used a process of elimination; they paired the unknown facial expression with a label given in the choice-from-array task and, after just two trials, freely labeled the new facial expression with the new label. These data indicate that past studies using this method may have overestimated children’s expression knowledge. Ó 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction When presented with an array of facial expressions (such as those claimed to signal happiness, sad- ness, and fear) and asked to find the person who is afraid, children as young as 2 years select the pre- dicted expression more often than would be expected by chance. The assumption has been that the http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2015.07.016 0022-0965/Ó 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: n.nelson@uq.edu.au (N.L. Nelson). Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 141 (2016) 49–64 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Experimental Child Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jecp