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Infants' emerging sensitivity to emotional body expressions: insights from asymmetrical frontal brain activity

Manuela Missana1, Tobias Grossmann2

  • 1Early Social Development Group, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences.

Developmental Psychology
|December 30, 2014
PubMed

Insights

Infant brain development shows sensitivity to emotional body language by 8 months. By this age, infants exhibit distinct brain responses to happy and fearful expressions, indicating approach or withdrawal tendencies.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Social cognition

Background:

  • Emotional body expression perception is a crucial human social skill.
  • Previous research indicates discrimination of emotional body expressions develops between 4 and 8 months of age.
  • The link between perceiving emotional body expressions and infants' motivational brain responses remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if infants' perception of emotional body expressions elicits brain responses related to motivation.
  • To examine frontal electroencephalography (EEG) alpha asymmetry in response to happy and fearful body expressions in infants.
  • To compare these responses in 4-month-old and 8-month-old infants.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to measure brain activity.
  • Recorded frontal EEG alpha asymmetry in response to dynamic body expressions.
  • Presented upright and inverted happy and fearful body expressions to 4- and 8-month-old infants.

Main Results:

  • Eight-month-olds, unlike 4-month-olds, displayed significant differences in frontal asymmetry between emotional expressions in the upright orientation.
  • Eight-month-olds showed greater left-hemisphere lateralization (approach tendency) for happy expressions.
  • Eight-month-olds exhibited greater right-hemisphere lateralization (withdrawal tendency) for fearful expressions.

Conclusions:

  • Infants' perception of emotion undergoes developmental tuning between 4 and 8 months.
  • The infant brain becomes sensitive to the motivational significance of emotional body expressions.
  • Specific hemispheric lateralization patterns reflect approach and withdrawal motivations in response to emotional cues.

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