“Aren’t you supposed to be sad?” Infants do not treat a stoic person as an unreliable emoter

Abstract

The current study examined how 18-month-old infants react to a “stoic” person, that is, someone who displays a neutral facial expression following negative experiences. Infants first watched a series of events during which an actor had an object stolen from her. In one condition, infants then saw the actor display sadness, while she remained neutral in the other condition. Then, all infants interacted with the actor in emotional referencing, instrumental helping, empathic helping, and imitation tasks. Results revealed that during the exposure phase, infants in both groups looked an equal amount of time at the scene and engaged in similar levels of hypothesis testing. However, infants in the sad group expressed more concern towards the actor than those in the neutral group. No differences were found between the two groups on the interactive tasks. This conservative test of selective learning and altruism shows that, at 18 months, infants are sensitive to the valence of emotional expressions following negative events but also consider an actor’s neutral expression just as appropriate as a sad expression following a negative experience. These findings represent an important contribution to research on the emergence of selective trust during infancy.

Infants’ Ability to Detect Emotional Incongruency: Deep or Shallow?

“…However, this “crybaby” condition is unlikely to generate an effect as previous research has failed to show such detection in infants of that age (Chiarella & Poulin‐Dubois, ). In addition, an experimenter expressing no emotion after finding a toy might not be considered an incongruent emoter as even older infants do not consider a neutral emoter who lost an object as incongruent (Chiarella & Poulin‐Dubois, ).…”

“…In a recently published follow‐up study, infants in the justified emotion group were more likely to be guided by the informant's emotions on a subsequent emotional referencing task, as well as more likely to help on an empathic helping task, compared to infants in the unjustified emotion group (Chiarella & Poulin‐Dubois, ). Interestingly, this effect did not generalize to learning situations where the emoter was neutral (Chiarella & Poulin‐Dubois, ). Similarly, 16‐ and 19‐month‐olds were found to demonstrate more concern and engage in more prosocial actions when their parent expressed sadness after hitting rather than missing their hand (Walle & Campos, ).…”

“Are You Really Sad?” Infants Show Selectivity in Their Behaviors Toward an Unconventional Emoter

“…More specifically, infants detected the incongruencies of an individual displaying Pollyanna-type behaviors (i.e., positive emotional expression to an object loss or pain event) or crybaby-type behaviors (i.e., negative emotional expression after receiving an object). Interestingly, an absence of emotional display following a negative event (object loss) is not considered anomalous, even by 18-month-olds (Chiarella & Poulin-Dubois, 2015). Similarly, 10-month-olds have been shown to be sensitive to a cartoon's facial expressions after either successfully or unsuccessfully achieving a desired goal (e.g., sadness after successfully jumping over a barrier; Skerry & Spelke, 2014).…”

“…Similarly, 10-month-olds have been shown to be sensitive to a cartoon's facial expressions after either successfully or unsuccessfully achieving a desired goal (e.g., sadness after successfully jumping over a barrier ;Skerry & Spelke, 2014). Interestingly, an absence of emotional display following a negative event (object loss) is not considered anomalous, even by 18-month-olds (Chiarella & Poulin-Dubois, 2015). Together, these studies show a developmental progression in the ability to detect action-emotion mismatches.…”

Flexible Concern: The Development of Multidetermined and Context‐Dependent Empathic Responding

“…Extending this work, another study examined 18‐month‐olds’ responses to a victim displaying a neutral or sad expression. As in the work described earlier , babies in this study showed concern for the neutral victim; however, they showed more concern for the sad victim, suggesting that although situational cues alone can generate concern, overt cues of distress intensify that concern.…”