Emotion Processing in Infancy

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of behavioral and neurophysiological research on the discrimination and categorization of emotional expressions in the first year of life. Three recent lines of research with theoretical implications beyond perceptual discrimination of facial expressions are discussed. The first focuses on the development of attentional biases towards facial expressions. Between 5 and 7 months of age infants start to attend preferentially towards fearful faces rather than happy faces and disengage attention less easily from fearful faces than from happy or neutral faces. Recent studies have shown that there are individual differences between infants regarding these biases, which may potentially be informative with respect to later emotion regulation abilities or affective dysfunctions. Studies within the second line of research have shown that infants process emotional facial expressions differently depending on the referent of the expression. For instance, 7-month-olds respond with increased attention to a fearful face that looks towards an object than a fearful face without a clear referent. In contrast, an angry face with eyes gazing straight ahead receives more attention by infants of the same age than an angry face looking to the side. This research and its implications on the development of social referencing and observational fear learning will also be discussed. In the third line of research, eye tracking is used to examine infants' looking patterns at faces with different emotional expressions. I will conclude with open questions and future directions for the field.

Dynamic facial expressions of emotions are discriminated at birth

“…The authors suggested that during the very first days of postnatal life newborns are mostly exposed to smiling faces with directed gaze and this facial expression is crucial to promote social interactions [ 9 ]. This is in line with evidence demonstrating that early in life infants are more attracted by smiling faces [ 11 ], and are facilitated in the recognition of face identity when faces display a happy emotional expression [ 12 , 13 ]. However, both of these studies [ 8 , 9 ] used as stimuli static photographs in which the perceptual differences between the two facial expressions were very pronounced.…”

‘Something in the way you move’: Infants are sensitive to emotions conveyed in action kinematics

“…Moreover, 5‐month‐old infants showed selective facial activity in response to bimodal, but not unimodal, laughing and crying emotional expressions (Isomura & Nakano, ). In sum, these EMG studies are in line with behavioural and neuroimaging evidence showing that emotional processing abilities undergo significant development in the first year of life (Grossmann, Striano, & Friederici, ; Hoehl, ). Second, these studies suggest that EMG is a valid technique to detect infants’ sensitivity to the valence of facial expressions.…”

“…By the end of the first year of life, infants possess sophisticated emotion perception skills: They can discriminate between different emotions from faces and bodies, categorize and recognize emotions and use emotional cues coming from their caregivers to guide their actions in their environment (Hoehl, ). Here, we have shown that, besides facial expressions and static body postures, infants can extract emotion‐related information also from action kinematics.…”

Try to look on the bright side: Children and adults can (sometimes) override their tendency to prioritize negative faces.

“…This does not, however, preclude the possibility that faster attention to negative stimuli develops with age or is learned from experience. Preferential looking to fearful faces over happy or neutral expressions does not emerge until 7 months, coinciding with when infants first learn to crawl and parents start directing more negative affect toward them (see Hoehl, 2014; Leppänen, 2016). More frequent exposure to negative or hostile environments also increases perceptual sensitivity to anger (Cicchetti & Ng, 2014; Pollak & Tolley-Schell, 2003).…”