Putting the face in context: Body expressions impact facial emotion processing in human infants

Abstract

Body expressions exert strong contextual effects on facial emotion perception in adults. Specifically, conflicting body cues hamper the recognition of emotion from faces, as evident on both the behavioral and neural level. We examined the developmental origins of the neural processes involved in emotion perception across body and face in 8-month-old infants by measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs). We primed infants with body postures (fearful, happy) that were followed by either congruent or incongruent facial expressions. Our results revealed that body expressions impact facial emotion processing and that incongruent body cues impair the neural discrimination of emotional facial expressions. Priming effects were associated with attentional and recognition memory processes, as reflected in a modulation of the Nc and Pc evoked at anterior electrodes. These findings demonstrate that 8-month-old infants possess neural mechanisms that allow for the integration of emotion across body and face, providing evidence for the early developmental emergence of context-sensitive facial emotion perception.

Development of body emotion perception in infancy: From discrimination to recognition

“…However, it would be premature to conclude that the development of body emotion knowledge has the exact same trajectory as face emotion knowledge because there are many aspects of emotion knowledge development that are yet to be examined. The importance of contextual factors in early emotion processing is evident in the finding by Rajhans, Jessen, Missana, and Grossmann (2016) that body cues play a key role in the perception of facial emotions at 8 months of age. Furthermore, in a peek-a-boo paradigm using familiar individuals, Kahana-Kalman and Walker-Andrews (2001) found intermodal matching of facial and vocal emotions even at 3.5 months of age.…”

Impression Formation in the Human Infant Brain

“…The minimum sample size was partly determined based on a literature review of comparable infant neuroimaging and eyetracking designs ( Peltola et al. 2009 ; Rajhans et al. 2016 ; Jessen and Grossmann 2017 ; Grossmann et al.…”

Integrated Emotion Processing in Infancy: Matching of Faces and Bodies

“…In a recently published study, Rajhans, Jessen, Missana, and Grossmann () found that 8‐month‐olds' event‐related brain potential (ERP) responses to happy/angry faces are affected by previously presented bodily expressions. The current study examined infants' processing of the correspondence between facial and body emotions at a younger age, namely 6.5 months, which is the youngest age at which sensitivity to body emotions has been demonstrated (Zieber et al., ,b).…”