The development of emotion processing of body expressions from infancy to early childhood: A meta-analysis

Abstract

Body expressions provide important perceptual cues to recognize emotions in others. By adulthood, people are very good at using body expressions for emotion recognition. Thus an important research question is: How does emotion processing of body expressions develop, particularly during the critical first 2-years and into early childhood? To answer this question, we conducted a meta-analysis of developmental studies that use body stimuli to quantity infants' and young children's ability to discriminate and process emotions from body expressions at different ages. The evidence from our review converges on the finding that infants and children can process emotion expressions across a wide variety of body stimuli and experimental paradigms, and that emotion-processing abilities do not vary with age. We discuss limitations and gaps in the literature in relation to a prominent view that infants learn to extract perceptual cues from different sources about people's emotions under different environmental and social contexts, and suggest naturalistic approaches to further advance our understanding of the development of emotion processing of body expressions.

EgoActive: Integrated Wireless Wearable Sensors for Capturing Infant Egocentric Auditory–Visual Statistics and Autonomic Nervous System Function ‘in the Wild’

“…This important design feature means that researchers can also systematically test and compare populations from a wide range of cultural and socio-economical environments, beyond the WEIRD countries. Indeed, very little is known about the extent to which existing developmental models, based on lab data collected in WEIRD countries, explain the cognitive and socio-emotional development of children worldwide (e.g., [ 17 , 18 , 135 ]). These newly developed tools for the naturalistic approaches are crucial for achieving step changes in understanding child development across longer age spans through larger-scale studies.…”