Perception of auditory and visual emotional information in primary school age children and its impact on their academic progress

Abstract

This work explored the connection between the characteristics of perception of nonverbal emotional information in two modalities of presentation - visual and auditory - with indicators of school achievements in 32 schoolchildren aged 8-9 years. We studied how the children recognised four basic emotions - "joy", "sadness", "anger", "fear" - in facial expressions and intonation of speech. The characteristics of their perceptions were compared with their academic achievements in three school disciplines: Russian language, reading and mathematics. It is shown that there is a clear correlation between the child's school progress and acoustic perception of emotions, while no connection with visual perception was found. It was revealed that the features of the relationship between the effectiveness of perception of emotions and school performance differed in boys and girls and also depended on the specific school subject and the type of emotion. Unlike girls, boys showed an improvement in academic performance when the accuracy of their emotion recognition increased. There was no evidence of a link between successful learning and the preferred type of perception of emotional information (acoustic or visual) in primary school children.