The Infant as Onlooker: Learning From Emotional Reactions Observed in a Television Scenario

Mumme, Donna L.; Fernald, Anne

doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00532

Cited by 249 publications

(161 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…However, a necessary effect of this procedure was that the amount of information and its timing varied across infants. In future studies, social referencing in a highly controlled situation (e.g., Mumme & Fernald, 2003) might be examined in which all infants receive emotional information on a consistent schedule and without requiring an active reference by the infant. In this way, infants' relation of emotion to novel objects as well as behavior regulation could be more accurately assessed.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

12-month-old infants allocate increased neural resources to stimuli associated with negative adult emotion.

Carver

Vaccaro

2007

Developmental Psychology

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Young infants use caregivers' emotional expressions to guide their behavior in novel, ambiguous situations. This skill, known as social referencing, likely involves at least 3 separate abilities: (a) looking at an adult in an unfamiliar situation, (b) associating that adult's emotion with the novel situation, and (c) regulating their own emotions in response to the adult's emotional display. The authors measured each of these elements individually as well as how they related to each other. The results revealed that 12-month-olds allocated more attention, as indicated by event-related potential measures, to stimuli associated with negative adult emotion than to those associated with positive or neutral emotion. Infants' interaction with their caregiver was affected by adult emotional displays. In addition, how quickly infants referenced an adult predicted both their brain activity in response to pictures of stimuli associated with negative emotion as well as some aspects of their behavior regulation. The results are discussed with respect to their significance for understanding why infants reference and regulate their behavior in response to adult emotion. Suggestions for further research are provided.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

12-month-old infants allocate increased neural resources to stimuli associated with negative adult emotion.

Carver

Vaccaro

2007

Developmental Psychology

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“…In another social referencing study, Mumme and Fernald (2003) showed 12-month-old infants an experimenter on a television screen displaying happy, neutral, or fear facial and vocal cues toward one ambiguous toy (the target) while ignoring another ambiguous toy (the distracter). These same toys were then presented to infants, and infants' interactions with the toys were assessed.…”

Section: A Evidence From Social Referencingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Vaish¹,

Großmann²,

Woodward³

2008

Psychological Bulletin

864

615

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There is ample empirical evidence for an asymmetry in the way that adults use positive versus negative information to make sense of their world; specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information. This bias is argued to serve critical evolutionarily adaptive functions, but its developmental presence and ontogenetic emergence have never seriously been considered. Here, we argue for the existence of the negativity bias in early development, evident especially in research on infant social referencing but also in other developmental domains. We discuss ontogenetic mechanisms underlying the emergence of this bias, and explore not only its evolutionary but also its developmental functions and consequences. Throughout, we suggest ways to further examine the negativity bias in infants and older children, and we make testable predictions that would help clarify the nature of the negativity bias during early development. KeywordsNegativity bias; Affective asymmetry; Social-cognitive development; Emotion; Social referencing Infants are exposed to a great deal of social information from birth, and their ability to use this information effectively is critical for development in many domains and for survival in general. This raises several important questions: do infants attend equally to all facets of this information, or do they attend to certain facets more than others? Do they, in addition, learn and remember particular kinds of information better than others? What evolutionary and developmental consequences do these ways of approaching the environment have? In this paper, we propose that infants display a negativity bias: that is, infants attend more to, are more influenced by, and use to a greater degree negative rather than positive facets of their environment. We propose possible ontogenetic pathways for the emergence of the negativity bias, and we argue that this bias serves important evolutionary and developmental functions.

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“…Negativity bias has been found for neural activation to a range of stimuli during evaluative categorization (Ito, Larsen, Smith, & Cacioppo, 1998), arousal measures predicted from valence ratings for positive and negative words (Ito, Cacioppo, & Lang, 1998;Lang, Bradley & Cuthbert, 1997;Ito, Larsen, et al, 1998), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures in response to facial expressions (e.g., Iidaka et al, 2001;Morris et al, 1996;Whalen, 1998;Whalen et al, 1998), identification of facial expression in schematic drawings (Oehman, Lundqvist, & Esteves, 2001), learning of correlations between affective and spatial information (Crawford & Cacioppo, 2002), attention and response to food labels (Rozin, Markwith, & Ross, 1990), speed and accuracy of detection and categorization of subliminally presented words (Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2003), and even infant learning and use of televised emotional reactions to guide interactions with novel objects (Mumme & Fernald, 2003).…”

Section: Negativity Bias and The "Beauty-is-good" Stereotype?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Stereotype Directionality and Attractiveness Stereotyping: Is Beauty Good or is Ugly Bad?

Griffin¹,

Langlois²

2006

Social Cognition

202

163

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Dion, Berscheid, and Walster (1972), in their seminal article, labeled the attribution of positive characteristics to attractive people the "beauty-is-good" stereotype. The stereotyping literature since then provides extensive evidence for the differential judgment and treatment of attractive versus unattractive people, but does not indicate whether it is an advantage to be attractive or a disadvantage to be unattractive. Two studies investigated the direction of attractiveness stereotyping by comparing judgments of positive and negative attributes for medium vs. low and medium vs. high attractive faces. Taken together, results for adults (Experiment 1) and children (Experiment 2) suggest that most often, unattractiveness is a disadvantage, consistent with negativity bias (e.g., Rozin & Royzman, 2001) but contrary to the "beauty-is-good" aphorism.

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The Infant as Onlooker: Learning From Emotional Reactions Observed in a Television Scenario

Cited by 249 publications

References 57 publications

12-month-old infants allocate increased neural resources to stimuli associated with negative adult emotion.

12-month-old infants allocate increased neural resources to stimuli associated with negative adult emotion.

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Stereotype Directionality and Attractiveness Stereotyping: Is Beauty Good or is Ugly Bad?

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