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Signatures of emotional face processing measured by event-related potentials in 7-month-old infants

Özlü Aran1, Sarah E Garcia2, Benjamin L Hankin3

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Denver, Denver, Colorado, USA.

Developmental Psychobiology
|February 22, 2023
PubMed

Insights

Infants

Area of Science:

  • Developmental psychology
  • Cognitive neuroscience
  • Infant perception

Background:

  • Facial emotion recognition develops in infancy.
  • Neural mechanisms of emotion processing in infants are not fully understood.
  • Previous research indicates emergence of emotion discrimination between 5-7 months.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate neural correlates of processing specific emotions in 7-month-old infants.
  • To examine the role of perceptual and attentional processes in infant emotion recognition.
  • To determine if infants show a bias towards processing fearful faces.

Main Methods:

  • Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 107 infants (51% female) aged 7 months.
  • Infants viewed faces displaying angry, fearful, and happy emotions.
  • Analysis focused on N290 (perceptual) and P400 (attentional) components.

Main Results:

  • The N290 component showed a stronger response to fearful and happy faces compared to angry faces.
  • The P400 component indicated a potential heightened response to fearful faces.
  • No significant differences were found in the negative central (Nc) component across emotions.

Conclusions:

  • Infant perceptual and attentional systems are sensitive to emotional facial expressions.
  • Early emotion processing in infancy does not reveal a fear-specific bias across measured neural components.
  • Findings contribute to understanding the developmental trajectory of emotion perception.

Keywords:
N290NcP400emotionsface processinginfant ERP

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