Emotion Faces for Kids: The Six Basic Expressions and How to Teach with Them

About this tool

Emotion faces for kids are picture cards that show a simple face for each of a handful of basic emotions, used to help young children learn to name feelings. A typical set covers happy, sad, angry, scared, surprised and disgusted, drawn clearly enough that a three year old can tell them apart. Parents, preschool and primary teachers, speech and language therapists and child therapists use them as a shared vocabulary: a way to talk about feelings with a child who does not yet have the words, and a way to make an abstract thing visible. This page is written for the adult who will use them. The printable here is a plain-words reference to the six expressions for the adult; picture cards, if you want them, are something you draw together, photograph or buy.

The six faces come from the work of the psychologist Paul Ekman, who in the late 1960s and 1970s showed photographs of posed expressions to people in several cultures, including a preliterate group in Papua New Guinea, and found that happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust were matched to the intended expression at rates well above chance. From this he argued for a small set of basic emotions with universal facial signals. That claim shaped almost every feelings chart and emotion card set in print, which is why the same six faces appear on classroom walls across the world.

Here is the caution that most card sets leave out. Facial expressions do not map onto feelings as cleanly as the cards imply. In 2019 the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett and colleagues reviewed the evidence in a long report for Psychological Science in the Public Interest and concluded that people scowl when angry only some of the time, scowl for other reasons the rest of the time, and that the same is true of every so-called signature expression. Faces vary with culture, context and the individual. A child can be furious with a flat face and delighted with a frown of concentration. The cards show what a feeling is often drawn as, not what it must look like. If you use them as a test, asking a child to read faces and marking the answers, you are testing a rule that is not reliable, and you risk teaching a child to distrust their own feelings when their face disagrees.

So use the cards as a vocabulary prompt, not a test. The question is not "what is this face feeling?" but "what do you see, and when have you felt something like that?" That shift does three things. It separates the drawing from the child's own experience, which is the thing you actually want to talk about. It lets a child be right whatever they say, which keeps them talking. And it models the real skill, which is noticing what is happening inside and finding a word for it, with the face as one clue among several: the body, the situation, what just happened.

Children learn emotion words gradually and in a fairly predictable order. Sherri Widen and James Russell showed that preschoolers begin with a split between feeling good and feeling bad, then add happy, sad and angry as distinct categories, with fear, surprise and disgust arriving later and often confused with one another for years. So a three year old who calls every unpleasant face "sad" is not wrong; they are on schedule. Start with the three the child already partly has, add the others as they come up in real life, and expect disgust and surprise to be the last to settle.

The cards work best woven into ordinary moments rather than set up as a lesson. Name your own feeling with a card at dinner. Pull out the matching face when a character in a story has an obvious reaction. Ask the child to find the card for how a sibling seems to feel after a fall. Play simple games: match the face to a situation, make the face in a mirror, sort the cards into "feels big" and "feels small," or build a short story that moves a character from one face to another. Keep sessions to a few minutes and stop while it is still fun. A calm-down corner with the cards on the wall gives a child a way to point when words are out of reach.

Evidence for emotion vocabulary teaching is reasonable at the program level. Susanne Denham's research on emotional competence in preschoolers, and the social and emotional learning programs built on it, link a larger feeling vocabulary to better self-regulation and peer relationships. There is no trial of face cards on their own, and there does not need to be: they are one prop in a larger practice of talking about feelings. The cards suit toddlers through early primary age, children with language delays, and children who find direct questions about feelings too exposing. The cards should never be used to drill facial recognition as if it were a skill a child is failing, and that matters most for autistic children, who are often tested on exactly this; the caution that faces are unreliable signals of feeling applies to every child. Whether pictures, context or words help a particular child most is individual, not something a diagnosis predicts.

Common mistakes: using the cards only when a child is upset, so they become a signal of trouble; correcting a child's reading of a face; asking a child who is mid-meltdown to pick a card; and expecting the cards to do the regulating. If a child by five or six still has very few feeling words, seems not to notice or respond to others' emotions, or has intense, long outbursts most days, talk with a pediatrician or a child therapist. Psychology.com's directory lets you search for one by specialty at no cost. The Emotion Faces Chart and Emotion Cards on this site are the general versions, the Feelings Chart gives a larger vocabulary for older children, and Emotional Regulation Activities for Kids covers what to do once the feeling has a name.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Reviewed the account of Ekman's six expressions and Barrett's critique, the developmental sequence, and the framing of the cards as a vocabulary prompt for the adult rather than a test of the child.

References

1. Ekman P, Friesen WV. Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1971;17(2):124-129.
2. Barrett LF, Adolphs R, Marsella S, Martinez AM, Pollak SD. Emotional expressions reconsidered: challenges to inferring emotion from human facial movements. Psychological Science in the Public Interest. 2019;20(1):1-68.
3. Widen SC, Russell JA. Children acquire emotion categories gradually. Cognitive Development. 2008;23(2):291-312.
4. Denham SA. Emotional Development in Young Children. Guilford Press; 1998.
5. Barrett LF. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2017.

Emotion Faces for Kids FAQ