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Measuring Attentional Biases for Threat in Children and Adults
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When in infancy does the "fear bias" develop?

Tobias Grossmann1, Sarah Jessen2

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA.

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
|October 4, 2016
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Infants may not show a fear bias at 5 months old. Motion in fearful face videos, not emotion itself, may explain previous findings in infant attention research.

Keywords:
BodyEmotionFaceFearInfancyMotion

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Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Infant Perception
  • Emotional Development

Background:

  • Infants typically develop a bias for processing fearful faces around 7 months of age.
  • Previous studies using static images did not find this bias in younger infants.
  • A recent study suggested 5-month-olds show a fear bias with dynamic (video) stimuli.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To re-examine the findings of Heck et al. (2016) regarding 5-month-old infants' attention to fearful faces.
  • To investigate whether motion differences in video stimuli confound emotion perception in infants.
  • To determine if the observed fear bias in 5-month-olds is driven by emotion or physical characteristics of the stimuli.

Main Methods:

  • Analysis of video stimuli used in Heck et al. (2016) study.
  • Quantification of motion within video displays of different facial expressions.
  • Comparison of motion levels across fearful, happy, and neutral faces.

Main Results:

  • The amount of motion in the video stimuli was confounded with emotion.
  • Fearful face videos exhibited the greatest amount of motion compared to happy and neutral faces.
  • This motion difference may have driven the infants' looking patterns, rather than the emotional content.

Conclusions:

  • The presence of motion artifacts in stimuli challenges previous conclusions about early fear bias.
  • 5-month-olds' sensitivity to fear requires further investigation with motion-controlled stimuli.
  • Controlling for physical differences like motion is crucial for accurate infant perception research.