When examining the development of this ability, it is evident that there is great improvement from age 8 to age 21 in both accuracy and speed with large effect sizes (0.9 to 1.0). Nonetheless, females outperform males starting in childhood and the difference remains stable throughout early adulthood and even increasing for speed. A similar pattern is seen for the other social cognition tests in the CNB (Figure 2). Thus, the emotion identification test is sensitive to normative individual differences in performance as affected by age and sex.
