Five-and 12-month-old Japanese and American infants participated in a nonpainful arm restraint procedure. Facial responses were scored with an anatomically based coding system (Baby FACS, an adaptation for infants of Ekman and Friesen's, 1978, Facial Action Coding System, or FACS). Nonfacial body activity (struggling) and negative vocalizations also were scored. Results showed that older infants' latencies to negative response were shorter than those of younger infants, and older infants produced proportionately more negative facial behavior. In addition, 5-month-old American infants produced criterion negative facial expressions more quickly than 5-month-old Japanese infants. However, infants of both cultures at both ages eventually produced similar facial configurations and nonfacial behaviors. These findings support the hypothesis that infants' emotional facial expressions are universal.To a considerable degree, the recent resurgence of interest in emotion within developmental psychology rests on the striking evidence produced almost a quarter of a century ago which demonstrated that certain basic emotions have universally recognized facial expressions (Ekman & Friesen, 1971;Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969;Izard, 1971). The data on recognition are often assumed to entail corresponding universality in the production of these prototypic expressions. However, recent research on concept formation (Strauss, 1979) has shown that prototype recognition may be based on abstraction from exemplars that never exactly correspond to the target itself. Furthermore, evidence for the universality of adult facial expressions does not necessarily imply developmental fixity (Oster & Ekman, 1978; Oster, Hegley, & Nagel, in press). Therefore, despite universality in recognition, individual, cultural, and age differences may exist in the spontaneous production of emotional facial expressions. Direct examination of spontaneous facial behavior is necessary both to confirm the universality of adult expressions of emotion and to explicate their origins and development.This study represents the first step in a broad cross-cultural
The developmental significance of temperament lies primarily in its impact on the social context of the child, according to most recent conceptualizations (Goldsmith and Camps, 1982; Lerner and Lemer, 1983; Thomas and Chess, 1977). In infancy, the central figure in the baby's social world is the attachment figure, and thus a major issue for temperament research is: How do individual differences in the various dimensions of temperament influence the developing attachment relationship? The joint study of attachment and temperament may prove particularly instructive because it involves one variable that is primarily relational-attachmentWe appreciate the comments of Jacqueline V. Lerner
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