Affective Influences on Startle in Five-Month-Old Infants: Reactions to Facial Expressions of Emotion

Balaban, Marie T.

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1995.tb00853.x

Cited by 42 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…de Haan & Matheson (2009) note that the recognition of emotions relies on both perceptual and conceptual processing as the infant recognizes distinctions in the stimulus characteristics and then extracts meaning. It is likely that all of the infants in the current study can do the former (Balaban, 1995), but it is unclear when the latter emerges. For example, Oakes and Ellis (2013) found that between 4 and 12 months of age, infants can increasingly scan more features of a face, expanding the amount and type of information they could potentially derive.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…This may be due to infants' neurally-driven “sticky fixation” to attended stimuli (Hood & Atkinson, 1993), working in tandem with a normative bias to preferentially attend to stimulus valence (DeLoache & LoBue, 2009; LoBue & DeLoache, 2010; LoBue et al, 2010). As another example, the presence of an affective face will modulate the early-emerging eye-blink startle by 5 months of age, such that angry faces potentiate the startle response, which is in turn attenuated by happy faces (Balaban, 1995). Perceptual cues may initially capture infants' attention, setting the stage for later conceptual learning regarding the meaning conveyed by emotion faces (Quinn, 2011).…”

Section: Attention To Threat As a Normative Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The impact of negative affect on attention patterns to threat across the first 2 years of life.

Pérez‐Edgar

Morales

LoBue

et al. 2017

Developmental Psychology

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The current study examined the relations between individual differences in attention to emotion faces and temperamental negative affect across the first two years of life. Infant studies have noted a normative pattern of preferential attention to salient cues, particularly angry faces. A parallel literature suggests that elevated attention bias to threat is associated with anxiety, particularly if coupled with temperamental risk. Examining the emerging relations between attention to threat and temperamental negative affect may help distinguish normative from at-risk patterns of attention. Infants (N=145) ages 4 to 24 months (Mean=12.93 months, SD=5.57) completed an eye-tracking task modeled on the attention bias “dot-probe” task used with older children and adults. With age, infants spent greater time attending to emotion faces, particularly threat faces. All infants displayed slower latencies to fixate to incongruent versus congruent probes. Neither relation was moderated by temperament. Trial-by-trial analyses found that dwell time to the face was associated with latency to orient to subsequent probes, moderated by the infant's age and temperament. In young infants low in negative affect longer processing of angry faces was associated with faster subsequent fixation to probes; young infants high in negative affect displayed the opposite pattern at trend. Findings suggest that although age was directly associated with an emerging bias to threat, the impact of processing threat on subsequent orienting was associated with age and temperament. Early patterns of attention may shape how children respond to their environments, potentially via attention's gate-keeping role in framing a child's social world for processing.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Attention To Threat As a Normative Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of negative affect on attention patterns to threat across the first 2 years of life.

Pérez‐Edgar

Morales

LoBue

et al. 2017

Developmental Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The ecological approach to social perception, grounded in Gibson's theory of object perception (Gibson, 1979), holds that people's faces provide adaptive information about the social interactions they afford. For example, the 'cute' face of a baby elicits approach and protective responses (Berry & McArthur, 1986;Zebrowitz, 1997); an angry face potentiates avoidance and defensive responses (Balaban, 1995;Marsh, Ambady, & Kleck, 2005). Although ecological theory assumes that our perceptions of faces will often be accurate, it also proposes that attunements to certain facial information can produce biased perceptions through overgeneralization effects (Zebrowitz, 1996(Zebrowitz, , 1997Zebrowitz & Montepare, 2006).…”

Section: The Conceptual Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Psychological Face Perception: Why Appearance Matters

Zebrowitz

Montepare

2008

Social & Personality Psych

524

467

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We form first impressions from faces despite warnings not to do so. Moreover, there is considerable agreement in our impressions, which carry significant social outcomes. Appearance matters because some facial qualities are so useful in guiding adaptive behavior that even a trace of those qualities can create an impression. Specifically, the qualities revealed by facial cues that characterize low fitness, babies, emotion, and identity are overgeneralized to people whose facial appearance resembles the unfit (anomalous face overgeneralization), babies (babyface overgeneralization), a particular emotion (emotion face overgeneralization), or a particular identity (familiar face overgeneralization). We review studies that support the overgeneralization hypotheses and recommend research that incorporates additional tenets of the ecological theory from which these hypotheses are derived: the contribution of dynamic and multi-modal stimulus information to face perception; bidirectional relationships between behavior and face perception; perceptual learning mechanisms and social goals that sensitize perceivers to particular information in faces.

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“…Interparental conflict may have an impact on early emotional development due to decreases in sensitive caregiving (Krishnakumar & Buehler, 2000), as well as direct exposure to aggressive interactions between caregivers (Crockenberg et al, 2007). Basic research suggests that 5-month-old infants discriminate between different emotional states, with expressions of anger eliciting greater attention and arousal than happy or neutral (Balaban, 1995; Grossmann, Oberecker, Koch, & Friederici, 2010; Grossmann, Striano, & Friederici, 2005). Moore (2009) showed that infants who witnessed vocal anger toward their mother demonstrated altered parasympathetic nervous system responses to an immediately subsequent stressful interaction with their mother.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

What Sleeping Babies Hear

2013

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Experiences of adversity in the early years of life alter the developing brain. However, evidence documenting this relationship often focuses on severe stressors and relies on peripheral measures of neurobiological functioning during infancy. The present study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during natural sleep to examine associations between a more moderate environmental stressor (non-physical interparental conflict), and 6–12 month-old infants’ neural processing of emotional tone of voice. The primary question was whether interparental conflict experienced by infants is associated with neural responses to emotional tone of voice, particularly very angry speech. Results indicated that maternal report of higher interparental conflict was associated with infants’ heightened neural responses to very angry versus neutral speech across several brain regions implicated in emotion and stress reactivity and regulation (including rostral anterior cingulate cortex, caudate, thalamus and hypothalamus) – suggesting that even moderate environmental stress may be associated with brain functioning during infancy.

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Affective Influences on Startle in Five-Month-Old Infants: Reactions to Facial Expressions of Emotion

Cited by 42 publications

References 46 publications

The impact of negative affect on attention patterns to threat across the first 2 years of life.

The impact of negative affect on attention patterns to threat across the first 2 years of life.

Social Psychological Face Perception: Why Appearance Matters

What Sleeping Babies Hear

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