Emotional Expressions In Infants

Infants are exposed to many different stimuli from birth and the acquisition of this material is remarkable. The particular focus of emotional expressions is an evolving field. We will discuss the perception of emotional expressions by an infant and the role that familiarity plays in it. Contextual information such as the familiarity of a person can affect an infant, as young as 3 months old and their perception of an emotion. Studies of different ages of infant’s and their ability to discriminate between a variety of emotional expressions indicate the factors that facilitate the acquisition process. Kahana-Kalman and Walker-Andrews (2001) selected 72 infants from announcements of births in newspapers that were approximately 3.5 months in …show more content…
They had been recruited by birth announcements and referrals. This study’s focus was on whether an infant was able to generalize their identification of emotional expressions to unfamiliar people when presented with a familiar person as their baseline model. In this study an infant was placed in front of 1 monitor and a camera was also present that had the observer viewing live feed from the recording of the infant’s visual attention and noting this information down. The Parent Habituation (PH) sequence was presented to half of the children (n = 40) where they were habituated to their parent’s facial and vocal expression of emotions. The other half (n = 40) was in the Stranger Habituation (SH) sequence, which they viewed an unfamiliar person’s facial and vocal expression of emotions. One infant from the SH sequence and one from the PH sequence are paired to view the same video clip of parental expressions. Half of the infants in both sequences were habituated to the facial and vocal expressions of either the sad emotion or the happy emotion. Being shown alternating video clips that presented the facial and vocal expression of the emotion by a female and then a male habituated the infants. Once infants were deemed habituated another clip was presented that presented the familiar expression or the novel expression correlating with the 1 of 4 conditions that were presented above. The looking times of the infants were recorded by an observer and then recorded by another 2 observers, which accounted for the inter-rater reliability deeming the study reliable. Results of this experimented indicated that infants showed a marked increase in interest when presented with a change in expression, person or both when viewing their own parents. However infants showed no increase in interest when presented with a change in expression, person