Article2001

The Role of Person Familiarity in Young Infants' Perception of Emotional Expressions

Ronit Kahana‐Kalman · Arlene S. Walker‐Andrews

191 citations0/0 files storedChild Development

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Child and Animal Learning Development Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development Face Recognition and Perception

Abstract

This research investigated the role of person familiarity in the ability of 3.5-month-old infants to recognize emotional expressions. Infants (N = 72) were presented simultaneously with two filmed facial expressions, happy and sad, accompanied by a single vocal expression that was concordant with one of the two facial expressions. Infants' looking preferences and facial expressions were coded. Results indicated that when the emotional expressions were portrayed by each infant's own mother, infants looked significantly longer toward the facial expressions that were accompanied by affectively matching vocal expressions. Infants who were presented with emotional expressions of an unfamiliar woman did not. Even when a brief delay was inserted between the presentation of facial and vocal expressions, infants who were presented with emotional expressions of their own mothers looked longer at the facial expression that was sound specified, indicating that some factor other than temporal synchrony guided their looking preferences. When infants viewed the films of their own mothers, they were more interactive and expressed more positive and less negative affect. Moreover, infants produced a greater number of full and bright smiles when the sound-specified emotion was "happy," and particularly when they viewed the happy expressions of their own mothers. The average duration of negative affect was significantly longer for infants who observed the unfamiliar woman than for those who observed their own mothers. These results show that when more contextual information-that is, person familiarity-was available, infants as young as 3.5 months of age recognized happy and sad expressions. These findings suggest that in the early stages of development, infants are sensitive to contextual information that potentially facilitates some of the meaning of others' emotional expressions.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 191 citations exist upstream.

References

1952The origins of intelligence in children.1978Facial Action Coding System 2018The Interpersonal World of the Infant 1978The Infant's Response to Entrapment between Contradictory Messages in Face-to-Face Interaction 1979Communication and cooperation in early infancy : A description of primary intersubjectivity 1989Emotions and emotional communication in infants.1985Four-month-old infants prefer to listen to motherese 1982The Bimodal Perception of Speech In Infancy

Cited by

2004Gender Differences in Automatic In-Group Bias: Why Do Women Like Women More Than Men Like Men?2007THE INTERACTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL SMILING 2001Peekaboo: A new look at infants' perception of emotion expressions.2010Infant perception of audio-visual speech synchrony.2002Mothers, Fathers, and Infants: The Role of Person Familiarity and Parental Involvement in Infants’ Perception of Emotion Expressions 2006The decline of cross-species intersensory perception in human infants

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.