[Construction and evaluation of a facial expression database of children].

This study constructed and evaluated a facial expression database of children age 11 to 13 years old. To construct the database, we took 535 facial images of 53 male and 54 female Japanese children. The children were requested to express one neutral and four other emotions (happiness, surprise, sadness, and anger). To evaluate the subjective strength of the facially-expressed emotions, we had 43 Japanese participants (mean age = 22.67 years old) rate the strength of the four emotions for the facial images using a seven-point scale. We found that (a) the participants appropriately recognized the emotions from all the facial images except those showing sadness, (b) the male faces were rated as expressing surprise, sadness, and anger more strongly than the female faces, and (c) the female faces were rated as expressing happiness more strongly than the male faces. These results suggest that there may be a gender difference in the production of facial expressions in children 11 to 13 years old.