Dynamic facial expressions of emotions are discriminated at birth

Addabbo, Margaret; Longhi, Elena; Marchis, I; Tagliabue, Paolo; Turati, Chiara

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0193868

Cited by 35 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Moreover, it has been argued that early face-to-face interactions may form the basis of facial mimicry [13]. Although newborns can perceptually discriminate facial emotional expressions [14], the earliest evidence of emotional facial mimicry in infancy has been found around 5 months of age [15], but not earlier [16]. Importantly, scholars have described the function of mimicry as a “social glue” fostering liking, similarity and affiliation among social partners [17–19] Indeed, facial mimicry of emotional expressions is thought to facilitate emotion recognition [20] and be related to empathy [21, 22].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The modulation of facial mimicry by attachment tendencies and their underlying affiliation motives in 3-year-olds: An EMG study

2019

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From early in life, facial mimicry represents an important example of implicit non-verbal communication. Facial mimicry is conceived of as the automatic tendency to mimic another person’s facial expressions and is thought to serve as a social glue among interaction partners. Although in adults mimicry has been shown to be moderated by the social context and one’s needs to affiliate with others, evidence from behavioural mimicry studies suggest that 3-year-olds do not yet show sensitivity to social dynamics. Here, we examined whether attachment tendencies, as a proxy for interindividual differences in affiliation motivation, modulates facial mimicry in 3-year-olds. Resistant and avoidant insecure attachment tendencies are characterized by high and low affiliation motivation, respectively, and these were hypothesized to lead to either enhancement or suppression of mimicry. Additionally, we hypothesized that these effects will be moderated by inhibitory control skills. Facial mimicry of happy and sad expressions was recorded with electromyography (EMG), attachment tendencies were assessed with a parent-report questionnaire and inhibitory control with the gift delay task. The final sample consisted of 42 children, with overall scores suggesting secure attachment. Our findings revealed that 3-year-olds mimicked happy and sad facial expressions. Moreover, resistant tendencies predicted enhanced sad but not happy facial mimicry, whereas avoidant tendencies were not significantly related to mimicry. These effects were not moderated by inhibitory control skills. In conclusion, these findings provide the first evidence for the modulation of mimicry by attachment tendencies and their underlying motivation for affiliation in young children, specifically for negatively-valenced emotional expressions.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The modulation of facial mimicry by attachment tendencies and their underlying affiliation motives in 3-year-olds: An EMG study

2019

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“…From the first days of life, both infants and mothers contribute to these interactions (Lavelli & Fogel, 2005;Lavelli et al, 2019;Murray, 2014;Parsons et al, 2010). As seminal studies have shown, even newborns show a clear preference for faces (Bushnell, 2001;DeCasper & Fifer, 1980;Macfarlane, 1975;Turati et al, 2006), and the capacity both to express and discriminate different emotional expressions (Addabbo et al, 2018;Farroni et al, 2007). From 2 to 4 months of age, infants show sensitivity to variations in social and emotional stimulation (Cohn et al, 1990;Grossmann et al, 2008;Legerstee & Varghese, 2001;Murray & Trevarthen, 1985;Stormark & Braarud, 2004;Trevarthen, 2011), and can use communicative behaviors to maintain social contact and elicit re-engagement when it is temporarily lost (Bigelow et al, 2018;Bigelow & Walden, 2009).…”

Section: Early Mother-infant Interactionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sculpting Culture: Early Maternal Responsiveness and Child Emotion Regulation – A UK-Italy Comparison

Bozicevic

Pascalis

Montirosso

et al. 2020

Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology

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Mother-infant interactions, including culturally specific features, have been found to predict child socio-emotional development (e.g., social communication and emotion regulation (ER)). However, research is lacking on the specific processes involved. We used a cross-cultural, longitudinal design, and a microanalytic coding approach to address this issue. Fifty-two mother-infant dyads were recruited from the UK ( N = 21) and Italy ( N = 31), representing Northern European and Mediterranean cultures, respectively. While these cultures share core features of parent-child relationships, their values about emotional expressiveness differ. We observed face-to-face mother-infant interactions at 2 months (T1), and coded infant socio-emotional behavior and maternal responses. Children were seen again at 2 years (T2), when their ER in the face of frustration, using the Barrier Task, was assessed, and the occurrence of different “mature” strategies (communicative and autonomous) coded. Results revealed common features of interactions at T1 (infant socio-emotional expressions, and maternal positive responses), but also cultural variation in the frequency of different infant cues (more pre-speech in UK infants, more smiles in Italians), and of maternal responses to them. While greater overall maternal responsiveness at T1 predicted more mature ER in general at T2, cultural differences in early responsiveness to specific infant behaviors predicted later group differences in children’s use of particular ER strategies, with UK children using more communicative strategies, and Italians more autonomous. Findings indicate that positive maternal behaviors that are common across cultures (e.g., responsiveness) promote overall successful child emotion regulation, while culturally specific features of interactions are associated with how child socio-emotional outcomes are expressed.

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“…prediction about the face, jaw, eyes, mouth, and nose. One reason for doing this is to enable us to move away from end-to-end learning so as to improve performance by testing important feature groups as we know that certain emotional features are innately recognized [24].…”

Section: Context Phasementioning

confidence: 99%

Lateralized Approach for Robustness Against Attacks in Emotion Categorization from Images

Shehu

Siddique

Browne

et al. 2021

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Deep learning has achieved a high classification accuracy on image classification tasks, including emotion categorization. However, deep learning models are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Even a small change, imperceptible to a human (e.g. one-pixel attack), can decrease the classification accuracy of deep models. One reason could be their homogeneous representation of knowledge that considers all pixels in an image to be equally important is easily fooled. Enabling multiple representations of the same object, e.g. at the constituent and holistic viewpoints provides robustness against attacking a single view. This heterogeneity is provided by lateralization in biological systems. Lateral asymmetry of biological intelligence suggests heterogeneous learning of objects. This heterogeneity allows information to be learned at different levels of abstraction, i.e. at the constituent and the holistic level, enabling multiple representations of the same object. This work aims to create a novel system that can consider heterogeneous features e.g. mouth, eyes, nose, and jaw in a face image for emotion categorization. The experimental results show that the lateralized system successfully considers constituent and holistic features to exhibit robustness to unimportant and irrelevant changes to emotion in an image, demonstrating performance accuracy better than (or similar) to the deep learning system (VGG19). Overall, the novel lateralized method shows a stronger resistance to changes (10.86 − 47.72% decrease) than the deep model (25.15 − 83.43% decrease). The advances arise by allowing heterogeneous features, which enable constituent and holistic representations of image components.

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Dynamic facial expressions of emotions are discriminated at birth

Cited by 35 publications

References 35 publications

The modulation of facial mimicry by attachment tendencies and their underlying affiliation motives in 3-year-olds: An EMG study

The modulation of facial mimicry by attachment tendencies and their underlying affiliation motives in 3-year-olds: An EMG study

Sculpting Culture: Early Maternal Responsiveness and Child Emotion Regulation – A UK-Italy Comparison

Lateralized Approach for Robustness Against Attacks in Emotion Categorization from Images

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