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Peekaboo: a new look at infants' perception of emotion expressions

D P Montague1, A S Walker-Andrews

  • 1Department of Psychology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey-New Brunswick, USA. diane.montague@liu.edu

Developmental Psychology
|November 9, 2001
PubMed

Insights

Four-month-old infants showed distinct visual attention and emotional responses when exposed to different facial expressions during a peekaboo game. This suggests early infant emotion recognition abilities are influenced by context.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Infant Cognition
  • Social-Emotional Development

Background:

  • Understanding how infants perceive and respond to emotions is crucial for social development.
  • Previous research suggests infants' emotion recognition abilities emerge early in life.
  • The role of contextual cues in modulating infant emotional understanding remains an active area of investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate 4-month-old infants' responsiveness to various affective expressions within a familiar peekaboo game context.
  • To determine if infants can discriminate between different emotions (anger, fear, sadness) presented in a controlled setting.
  • To examine the influence of contextual information on infant emotion recognition and affective responses.

Main Methods:

  • Forty 4-month-old infants participated in a modified peekaboo game.
  • Infants were exposed to typical happy/surprised expressions followed by trials with systematically altered emotional expressions (anger, fear, sadness) or consistent expressions.
  • Measures included infant looking time and observable affective responsiveness.

Main Results:

  • Infants exhibited differential patterns of visual attention and affective responses to anger, fear, and sadness expressions.
  • Specific emotional expressions elicited unique looking time durations and behavioral reactions.
  • Results indicate infants' ability to discriminate and respond meaningfully to different adult emotion expressions.

Conclusions:

  • Contextual information significantly aids infants in recognizing and responding to emotion expressions.
  • Infants as young as 4 months demonstrate the capacity to discriminate between various emotions.
  • Converging measures of visual attention and affective responsiveness are effective in assessing early emotion understanding.

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