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Nazia Ali
Emotional Intelligence
Batch 4
30-9-2025
Faces We Wear: Emotional Expression from Childhood to Adulthood:
“You are too overly expressive.”
“Please avoid overreacting. Your responses seem a little over the top.”
Have you heard these sentences before?
In many cultures, emotional expression is not just a personal choice, shaped by social norms. Always showing pleasant feelings and suppressing unpleasant feelings is considered more suitable for surroundings. Meanwhile, some societies encourage openness in emotional expressions. These cultural expectations can significantly affect how people experience and communicate empathy.
Children tend to express feelings more openly and intensely whether it is joy, anger or sadness because they have not yet developed emotional control and cannot understand social criticism and pressures. As they grow with continuous correction for perfection such as, do not express too much, do not make faces or do not show your anger. By the time they reach adulthood, they have typically learned to manage, filter or mask their expressions, especially in public or professional settings. In 2007 Thomas and colleagues found that both children (7–13 years of age) and adolescents (14–18 years of age) are less sensitive than adults in discriminating static photos of anger and fear from neutral expressions, (1) whereas in 2010 Montirosso and colleagues found that sensitivity to animated expressions is already adult-like for anger at 7 years of age and for fear at 10 years of age (2). Choi and Watanuki found that adults with higher empathy scores showed better performance and deeper involvement in a facial expression recognition task (3).
From the uninhibited honesty of childhood to the measured responses of adulthood, our faces become mirrors of the environments we grow up in. While some societies celebrate expressive freedom, others teach emotional restraint as a form of social harmony. Emotional intelligence is not just about what we feel and what others feel but how well we read the feelings written on each other’s faces.
References:
1. Thomas, L. A., De Bellis, M. D., Graham, R., & LaBar, K. S. (2007). Development of emotional facial recognition in late childhood and adolescence. Developmental Science, 10(5), 547‑558. DOI:10.1111/j.1467‑7687.2007.00614.x
2. Montirosso, R., Peverelli, M., Frigerio, E., Crespi, M., & Borgatti, R. (2010). The development of dynamic facial expression recognition at different intensities in 4‑ to 18‑year‑olds. Social Development, 19(1), 71‑92. DOI:10.1111/j.1467‑9507.2008.00527.x
3. Yan, Z.; Pei, M.; Su, Y.(2017) Children’s empathy and their perception and evaluation of facial pain expression: An eye tracking study. Front Psychol, 8, 2284. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
