Felt or false smiles? Volitional regulation of emotional expression in 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old children.

The development of volitional emotion regulation of expression was examined with a modified disappointing gift paradigm and strategy for coding children's expressions. Forty-nine boys and 49 girls aged 4, 6, and 8 were motivated to volitionally deceive an observer by false smiling, regardless of whether they received an attractive, unattractive, or no gift. Ten naïve observers watched children's videotaped behavior in random order and judged the quality of emotion and type of gift. This impression analysis indicated that children's competence to volitionally regulate their expressions increased with age. In addition, this ability was positively associated with children's emotion understanding of how to differentiate between emotion and expression. Unexpectedly, girls did not display a superior volitional regulation of expression than boys.