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Putting the face in context: Body expressions impact facial emotion processing in human infants

Purva Rajhans1, Sarah Jessen1, Manuela Missana1

  • 1Early Social Development Group, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Stephanstrasse 1A, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience
|March 15, 2016
PubMed

Insights

Infants integrate body and facial emotions early in development. Conflicting body cues impair infants' neural ability to recognize facial emotions, showing context-sensitive perception emerges in early infancy.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental psychology
  • Cognitive neuroscience
  • Social cognition

Background:

  • Body expressions significantly influence facial emotion recognition in adults.
  • Conflicting body cues disrupt emotion recognition from faces at behavioral and neural levels.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the developmental origins of neural processes for emotion perception across body and face in 8-month-old infants.
  • To determine if body expressions impact facial emotion processing in infants.

Main Methods:

  • Event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured in 8-month-old infants.
  • Infants were presented with fearful or happy body postures followed by congruent or incongruent facial expressions.

Main Results:

  • Body expressions were found to impact facial emotion processing in infants.
  • Incongruent body cues impaired the neural discrimination of emotional facial expressions.
  • Priming effects correlated with attentional and recognition memory processes (modulating Nc and Pc components).

Conclusions:

  • 8-month-old infants possess neural mechanisms for integrating emotional information from body and face.
  • Context-sensitive facial emotion perception emerges early in human development.

Keywords:
Body expressionsERPEmotionInfantsPriming

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