The development of infant detection of inauthentic emotion.

Abstract

Appreciating authentic and inauthentic emotional communication is central to the formation of trusting and intimate interpersonal relationships. However, when infants are able to discriminate and respond to inauthentic emotion has not been investigated. The present set of studies was designed to investigate infant sensitivity to 3 specific cues of inauthenticity: the contextual congruency of the emotion, the degree of exaggeration of the emotion, and the clarity with which the emotion is communicated. In each experiment, 16-and 19-month-old infants were presented with an emotional communication in which an inauthentic cue was present or absent. Infant behavioral responding to the emotional context was observed and coded. In all 3 experiments, 19-month-old infants, but not 16-month-old infants, detected inauthentic emotional communication and differentially responded to the environment accordingly. These findings demonstrate that infants do not simply take all emotional communication at face value and are sensitive to features of emotional contexts beyond what is expressively communicated by the adult. Possible developmental mechanisms that may account for the observed developmental shift in infant emotional development are proposed, and implications for the present findings on future research in emotion and emotional development are highlighted.

Surprise! 20-month-old infants understand the emotional consequences of false beliefs

“…Our results add to a small body of research on infants' understanding of the causal antecedents of emotion (e.g., Chiarella & Poulin-Dubois, 2013;Skerry & Spelke, 2014;Walle & Campos, 2014) by demonstrating that by 20 months of age, infants grasp how an agent's beliefs could give rise to surprised responses. Future research should continue to explore infants' understanding of this affective dimension of belief, including whether infants use this understanding to guide their social interactions.…”

“…This suggests that the infants anticipated that the emoter would be angry with them if she saw them perform the offending action. Further support comes from recent work by Walle and Campos (2014) demonstrating that 19-month-olds distinguish between authentic and inauthentic emotional displays. In one experiment, infants saw a parent express pain after either hitting or missing her hand with a toy hammer.…”

Infant differential behavioral responding to discrete emotions.

“…For example, older infants may have demonstrated greater prosocial behavior across emotion conditions because they relied on contextual cues (e.g., a broken bunny) over and above the emotion communicated. The importance of context is gaining empirical attention in the emotion literature (see Aviezer et al, 2008; Barrett, Mesquita, & Gendron, 2011; Hassin, Aviezer, & Bentin, 2013), and recent research indicates that infants are sensitive to contextual elements when judging the authenticity/ credibility of adult emotion displays (e.g., Chiarella & Poulin-Dubois, 2013; Walle & Campos, 2014). Additionally, it is possible that familiar contexts may allow younger infants to demonstrate functionally specific behaviors through the use of emotion scripts (see Parkinson, Fischer, & Manstead, 2005; Russell 2003).…”

Social Referencing: Defining and Delineating a Basic Process of Emotion

“…As such, it is often the case that social referencing results in the changing of an individual's existing appraisal (e.g., Hornik, Risenhoover, & Gunnar, 1987;Parkinson & Simons, 2009). However, the communicated information need not necessarily change one's appraisal if the social partner is deemed uninformative or unreliable (Pasquini, Corriveau, Koenig, & Harris, 2007;Walle & Campos, 2014) or if the communicated information confirms an existing appraisal. Because ambiguities in the environment exist across the lifespan, so too does social referencing functionally manifest itself at any age (Feinman, 1982;Klinnert et al, 1983).…”