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ALSPAC – Age 8.5 – DANVA Faces Subtest

The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) assessed their cohort members (CMs) during the study’s age 8.5 sweep (Focus@8) using the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy’s (DANVA) Faces Subtest.

Details on this measure and the data collected from the CMs are outlined in the table below.


Domain:Social cognition
Measures:Nonverbal social information processing
Nonverbal receiving ability
Nonverbal sending accuracy
CHC:Gkn (General domain-specific knowledge)
Administration method:Trained interviewer; clinical setting; CAPI
Procedure:The child was sat in front of a computer screen, and the interviewer explained that they would be shown faces that depicted one of four emotions: happy, sad, angry, or fearful. The child was then shown 24 faces, each for approximately 2 seconds, and asked which of the four emotions corresponded to the faces. Faces were either high or low intensity (i.e. emotion was more or less obvious).
Link to questionnaire:http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/ (opens in new tab)
Scoring:The main outcome variable was the number of correct responses (0 - 24). In cases where there was only one missing value (N = 67), it was assumed the child scored correctly.
Item-level variable(s):f8dv400 - f8dv446a
Total score/derived variable(s):f8dv103
Descriptives:Raw score
N = 7303
Range = 0 - 24
Mean = 22.45
(click image to enlarge)
Age of participants:Mean = 103.82 months, SD = 3.92, Range = 89 - 127
Other sweep and/or cohort:None
Source:Nowicki, S., & Duke, M. P. (1994). Individual differences in the nonverbal communication of affect: The Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy Scale. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 18(1), 9-35.
Technical resources:Nowicki, S. (2000). Manual for the receptive tests of the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy 2. Atlanta, GA: Department of Psychology, Emory University.
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/our-data/clinical-measures/
Reference examples:Thompson, A., Sullivan, S., Heron, J., Thomas, K., Zammit, S., Horwood, J., ... & Harrison, G. (2011). Childhood facial emotion recognition and psychosis-like symptoms in a nonclinical population at 12 years of age: results from the ALSPAC birth cohort. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 16(2), 136-157.
Barona, M., Kothari, R., Skuse, D., & Micali, N. (2015). Social communication and emotion difficulties and second to fourth digit ratio in a large community-based sample. Molecular Autism, 6(1), 68.

For the named items in the table above, links are provided to their corresponding content on CLOSER Discovery. Where a variable range is provided, full variable lists can be accessed through the ‘Variable Groups’ tab on the linked Discovery page.


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This page is part of CLOSER’s ‘A guide to the cognitive measures in five British birth cohort studies’.