Mobile Technologies and Their Relationship to Children's Ability to Read Nonverbal Emotional Cues: A Cross-Temporal Comparison.

Key social learning occurs during early childhood with lasting effects throughout the lifespan. In the past 10 years, ownership of mobile technology grew rapidly, particularly in households with young children; this has dramatically changed the early learning landscape. With the ubiquity of mobile devices, many have questioned their effect on the social and emotional learning of children. To explore one aspect of this question, we conducted a cross-temporal comparison to compare two cohorts of sixth graders, one measured in 2012 and another in 2017. Each group took tests, one with still photographs of faces (diagnostic analysis of nonverbal accuracy 2 or DANVA2) and one with videotaped vignettes (the child and adolescent social perception measure or CASP), designed to measure their ability to accurately identify nonverbal emotional cues. We sought to explore whether changes in the early learning environment of the 2017 cohort, who grew up with mobile phones and tablets, could be related to participants' ability to read nonverbal emotional cues. We found that sixth-grade students in 2017 performed better than sixth-grade students in 2012 on the DANVA2, but not on the CASP. One possible reason participants improved on the test with still photographs is because mediated communication has become more visual and less text based, and sharing photographs of oneself and others is more common. Accordingly participants may be more accurate at interpreting emotional cues in photographs due to a larger exposure to photographs of faces.