Visual and auditory affect recognition in depressed and nondepressed latency aged children.

The level of facial and auditory affect recognition was assessed in depressed and in nondepressed children. There were six conditions. Subjects had to distinguish between and identify happy, sad and angry faces in one set of conditions. They had to do the same for affective voice intonations in another set and for emotional melodies in the remaining two conditions. The errors made to every expression under the six conditions were evaluated for the groups. The findings indicated that the depressed children were not impaired in facial affect recognition. However, there was a disturbance in auditory affect recognition associated with depression, along with a negative bias.