Rapid facial reactions in response to happy and angry expressions in 7‐month‐old infants

Abstract

Humans rapidly and spontaneously activate muscles in the face when viewing emotional facial expressions in others. These rapid facial reactions (RFRs) are thought to reflect low-level, bottom-up processes, and are theorized to assist an observer to experience and share the affect of another individual. It has been assumed that RFRs are present from birth; however to date, no study has investigated this response in children younger than 3 years of age. In the present study, we used facial electromyography (EMG) to measure corrugator supercilii (brow) and zygomaticus major (cheek) muscle activity in 7-month-old infants while they viewed happy and angry facial expressions. The results showed that 7-month olds exhibited greater zygomaticus activity in response to happy expressions than angry expressions, however, we found no evidence of differential corrugator muscle activity.

Selective facial mimicry of native over foreign speakers in preverbal infants

“…It should be noted that although we found evidence for mimicry overall, the mimicry scores for the mouth and eyebrow actions separately were not significantly different from zero. In addition, when we performed baseline-corrected analyses (see supplementary material), the effect of condition became nonsignificant and there was no evidence for mimicry, suggesting that the mimicry responses we found here might not be as robust as those reported in previous studies (e.g., Datyner, Henry, & Richmond, 2017; Geangu, Quadrelli, Conte, Croci, & Turati, 2016; Isomura & Nakano, 2016). There are several possible explanations for this.…”

Expanding Simulation Models of Emotional Understanding: The Case for Different Modalities, Body-State Simulation Prominence, and Developmental Trajectories

“…Using infants, Kaiser et al (2017) found that there was no evidence of facial EMG response to emotional faces in 4-month-olds, but for 7-month-olds, there was evidence of selective activations in the relevant regions for happy and fearful faces. Datyner et al (2017) showed similar results in 7-montholds viewing happy and angry facial expressions. Interestingly, Isomura and Nakano (2016) showed that infants aged 4-5 months showed increased corrugator EMG response to audiovisual crying and increased zygomaticus EMG response to audiovisual laughing, but no clear increase in response to unimodal emotional stimuli (faces or vocalizations individually).…”

‘Something in the way you move’: Infants are sensitive to emotions conveyed in action kinematics

“…Interestingly, previous studies have found no selective facial responses to angry faces at 7 months of age (Daytner et al, ; Geangu et al, ). Here, we have shown that at the age of 11 months, infants are sensitive to angry action kinematics.…”

“…Only very recently, facial EMG has started to be used as a tool to explore emotion processing in infancy (Datyner, Henry, & Richmond, ; Isomura & Nakano, ; Kaiser, Crespo‐Llado, Turati, & Geangu, ). These findings have shown that from 7 months on, infants respond with matching facial responses to happy and fearful faces, but not to angry faces (Datyner et al, ; Kaiser et al, ). Moreover, 5‐month‐old infants showed selective facial activity in response to bimodal, but not unimodal, laughing and crying emotional expressions (Isomura & Nakano, ).…”

“…For this reason, we considered fundamental to explore infants’ sensitivity to others’ angry and happy bodily kinematics. The age group (11‐month‐olds) was chosen in line with previous studies showing that infants’ ability to evaluate the nature of angry stimuli and react to them accordingly may develop later than 7 months of life and closer to the end of their first birthday (Datyner et al, ; Grossmann et al, ; Kaiser et al, ). Here, we expected infants to extract the emotion conveyed in action kinematics and to produce matching facial emotional configurations.…”