Recognition of the facial expressions of emotions is a critical communicative system early in development and continues to play an important role throughout adulthood. In the past, the results of developmental studies of emotional facial recognition have often conflicted. The present study was designed to examine the development of emotional facial recognition in a large sample of school‐aged children (n=120, ages 5‐10 y). In particular, we investigate whether emotion categories, i.e., those based on the visual spatial parameters of facial expression, develop in a similar fashion to those that also recruit lexical knowledge of emotion terms. We have found two distinct patterns of development and we suggest that these different profiles are a consequence of the very different cognitive abilities that they recruit.

Conclusion: Emotion cognition is a variegated domain which is differentially related to such areas of cognition as visuo‐spatial and lexical semantic abilities.