Do children and adults use their voices differently to communicate their emotions to others?

Have you ever wondered whether children and adults express emotions in the same way? 🎭 Think of a toddler getting frustrated with a toy that won’t work, or of a teenager being angry about the rules their parents set. Is their expression of anger similar to that of an angry adult? 💭 This 2017 study looked at whether teenagers and adults used their voice differently when asked to communicate different emotions vocally (meaning, using their tone of voice). 🗣️ Speech analysis of their recordings showed that the two age groups, in fact, were NOT equivalent in the way they used pitch (how high or low your voice sounds) to express various emotions. 🤯 The results of this study suggest that teenagers don’t express their emotions in the same way adults do. This is important to keep in mind when interacting with adolescents! 💬 Have you noticed this in your daily life? Let us know in the comments below! (Thank you to Daniel Nault and Olivia Merulla for preparing these slides!) #research #ygk #developmentalpsychology #psychology #development #adolescence #science

Are there differences in how adults and adolescents perceive emotional expressions in the voice?

If you’ve been following us for some time (👋), you may already know that children and adolescents are less accurate than adults in vocal emotion recognition tasks, where they are asked to identify what another person is feeling based on their tone of voice. WHY might that be? 🤔 One potential explanation may be that youth and adults perceive vocal emotions differently 👂… which could influence how they interpret them in emotion recognition tasks. Flip through to read more about an earlier study that looked at this very question, and let us know what you think below! 👍 (Special thanks to Bingyi Lin, who put together this infographic about the study!) #research #developmentalpsychology #emotionrecognition #scicomm

Differences between children and adolescents in how accurately they recognize emotions

As we develop, our ability to understand others’ emotional states based on their nonverbal cues continues to grow. 📈 But, it seems that the capacity to interpret facial expressions of emotion develops earlier than the same ability with vocal expressions! Because this skill is still developing throughout adolescence, it might be especially hard for youth to make sense of others’ tone of voice. 🔊

Check out our post to learn more about these findings! (A big shout out to Reem Atallah for creating this post!) Any questions? Leave a comment below! 👇

#research #ygk #developmentalpsychology #psychology #development #adolescence #science

What's in a voice?

Looking at the ability for teens to interpret and communicate affect, we found that teens are typically less accurate than adults at recognizing emotions from the tone of voice. This demonstrates the importance of explicitly communicating your emotions, especially with teenagers!