Family expressiveness relates to happy emotion matching among 9-month-old infants

Abstract

Perceiving and understanding the emotions of those around us is an imperative skill to develop early in life. An infant's family environment provides most of their emotional exemplars in early development. However, the relation between the early development of emotion perception and family expressiveness remains understudied. To investigate this potential link to early emotion perception development, we examined 38 infants at 9 months of age. We assessed infants' ability to match emotions across facial and vocal modalities using an intermodal matching paradigm for angry-neutral, happy-neutral, and sad-neutral pairings. We also attained family expressiveness information via parent report. Our results indicate a significant positive relation between emotion matching and family expressiveness specific to the happy-neutral condition. However, we found no evidence for emotion matching for the infants as a group in any of the three conditions. These results suggest that family expressiveness does relate to emotion matching for the earliest developing emotional category among 9-month-old infants and that emotion matching with multiple emotions at this age is a challenging task.

Do Preverbal Infants Understand Discrete Facial Expressions of Emotion?

“…Infants between 5 and 7 months of age can also match happy and angry vocalizations to facial expressions (Grossmann, Striano, & Friederici, 2006;Soken & Pick, 1992, 1999Vaillant-Molina, Bahrick, & Flom, 2013;Walker, 1982;Walker-Andrews, 1986; but see Palama et al, 2018). More recently, however, Ogren, Burling, and Johnson (2018) reported that 9-month-olds did not form intermodal matches for happy, sad, and angry expressions (when paired with a neutral expression). Unlike previous research, this study controlled for baseline expression preferences, thereby providing a more stringent test of intermodal matching.…”

Investigating emotion recognition in the first year of life using eye-tracking Methodology

“…Furthermore, Ogren's (2018) findings highlight the importance of family expressiveness in the infants' early environment, which captured the expressiveness of all members of a household. The current study, and much of the previous literature, only measured the expressiveness of the primary caregiver.…”

“…A recent study conducted on the role on family expressiveness on individual differences in emotion matching provides support for this explanation. Ogren, Burling, and Johnson (2018) found that family expressiveness was positively related to 9-month-old infants' ability to match a happy facial expression to corresponding vocal information. The authors speculated that this finding might be category learning in children, such that children often demonstrate superior learning when provided with exemplars that both fit and do not fit with the category being learned (Ankowski, Vlach, & Sandhofer, 2013;Gentner, Anggoro, & Klibanoff, 2011;Gentner & Namy, 1999).…”

Intermodal emotion matching at 15 months, but not 9 or 21 months, predicts early childhood emotion understanding: A longitudinal investigation

“…Participant information, such as age and number of participants excluded, at each time point is presented in Table 1. Some analyses of data from the 9-month visit have been previously reported (Ogren, Burling, & Johnson, 2018).…”