The Effects of Early Institutionalization on the Discrimination of Facial Expressions of Emotion in Young Children

Abstract

The current study examined the effects of institutionalization on the discrimination of facial expressions of emotion in 3 groups of 42-month-old children. One group consisted of children abandoned at birth who were randomly assigned to Care as Usual (institutional care) following a baseline assessment. Another group consisted of children abandoned at birth who were randomly assigned to high-quality foster care following a baseline assessment. A third group consisted of never-institutionalized children who were reared by their biological parents. All children were familiarized to happy, sad, fearful, and neutral facial expressions and tested on their ability to discriminate familiar versus novel facial expressions. Contrary to our prediction, all three groups of children were equally able to discriminate among the different expressions. Furthermore, in contrast to findings at 13–30 months of age, these same children showed familiarity rather than novelty preferences toward different expressions. There were also asymmetries in children’s discrimination of facial expressions depending on which facial expression served as the familiar versus the novel stimulus. Collectively, early institutionalization appears not to impact the development of the ability to discriminate facial expressions of emotion, at least when preferential looking serves as the dependent measure. These findings are discussed in the context of the myriad domains that are affected by early institutionalization.

Effects of early institutionalization on emotion processing in 12-year-old youth

“…At this same time point, nonverbal behavioral responses to sad, fearful, happy, and neutral facial expressions were also assessed separately using a visual comparison test. Similar to results from the event-related potential tasks, there were no significant differences in performance across groups at the baseline time point, or follow-up assessments that occurred when children were 42 months of age (Jeon, Moulson, Fox, Zeanah, & Nelson, 2010;Nelson, Parker, Guthrie, & BEIP Core Group, 2006).…”

Recognizing Facial Expressions of Emotion in Infancy: The Role of Face Familiarity

“…This atypical emotion recognition in institutionalized children may be due to insufficient caregiving, and/or inconsistent caregiving resulting in insecure attachment relationships (Zeanah et al, 2005). However, it should be noted that despite this neural difference, children's ability to discriminate facial expressions behaviourally did not differ significantly between the institutionalized and never-institutionalized children (Jeon et al, 2010).…”

Discrimination of amygdala response predicts future separation anxiety in youth with early deprivation

“…Although this is a powerful probe of amygdala reactivity, these imaging studies have not tested discrimination ability. Indeed, other studies have shown that PI children have little difficulty behaviorally discriminating clear exemplars of facial expressions (Jeon, Moulson, Fox, Zeanah, & Nelson, ; Nelson, Parker, & Guthrie, ); however, signal detection methods have revealed a decreased sensitivity for subtler discriminations of facial differences in PI children (Fries & Pollak, ; Pollak, Cicchetti, Hornung, & Reed, ). These findings suggest that early deprivation might interfere with discriminating between subtle social‐affective cues.…”