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PARENTAL PERCEPTION OF THE EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIONS OF

SIGHTED AND BLIND CHILDREN

Eleanor H. L. Leung

Department of Psychology: Experimental, Duke University, Durham 27708

Parents of blind and visually impaired (VI) children and normally developing sighted

children between 9.5 and 75 monthsof age were asked to indicate in a questionnaire: (1) whether

their children had ever expressed each of nine emotions -- happiness, interest, surprise, distress, anger, disgust, fear, shyness/shame, and guilt; (2) how often each emotion was expressed; (3) the

approximate age at which they remembered their child first showing the emotion; and, (4)

whether their child typically showed each emotion with their face, hand or body movements,

vocalizations, or some combination of these “modalities.”

Parents of blind/VI children expressed little difficulty “reading” their children’s

expressions of affect and were found to be as likely to use facial affect to interpret their

children’s emotional state as parents of sighted children. They also indicated that blind/VI

children expressed the nine emotions no less frequently than sighted children, once the emotion

had made its initial apperance. Both blind/VI and sighted children reportedly expressed

happiness and interest during the first six months of life, and anger and fear by the second half of

the first year. The onset age for disgust, surprise, and shyness/shame was estimated to occur

during the first year in sighted children, but not until the second year in blind/VI children. The

information provided by parental responses in the questionnaire indicate that blind/VI children

may be more facially expressive than they have previously been thought to be and that their

emotional expressions therefore deserve more systematic examination in the future.