Charting the development of emotion recognition from 6 years of age

Recognition of emotions within others is a necessary life skill. We know that this is a learnt skill, which develops throughout childhood and is deficient in some individuals. To put individual development in context, it is necessary to understand the nature of development amongst the normal population. Age-related centiles can be used to add this context. The level of emotion recognition is assessed using an ordinal outcome scale, and hence establishing age-related centiles for these measures creates particular analytical problems. In this paper, we use methodology previously developed by us for monitoring the development of visual acuity during childhood to calculate age-related centiles for emotion recognition ratings. The ratings do not consistently improve with age and appear to be affected by hormonal developments. A comparison of ability to rate emotions according to the stage of pubertal development is used to illustrate how the conversion of ordinal assessments to continuous centile scores facilitates the investigation. The specific issues relating to the application of the methodology to data that are not consistent in the direction of change with age and where large amounts of data can be gathered electronically are discussed.