Tuning the developing brain to emotional body expressions

Abstract

Reading others' emotional body expressions is an essential social skill. Adults readily recognize emotions from body movements. However, it is unclear when in development infants become sensitive to bodily expressed emotions. We examined event‐related brain potentials (ERPs) in 4‐ and 8‐month‐old infants in response to point‐light displays (PLDs) of happy and fearful body expressions presented in two orientations (upright and inverted). The ERP results revealed that 8‐month‐olds but not 4‐month‐olds respond sensitively to the orientation and the emotion of the dynamic expressions. Specifically, 8‐month‐olds showed (i) an early (200–400 ms) orientation‐sensitive positivity over frontal and central electrodes, and (ii) a late (700–1100 ms) emotion‐sensitive positivity over temporal and parietal electrodes in the right hemisphere. These findings suggest that orientation‐sensitive and emotion‐sensitive brain processes, distinct in timing and topography, develop between 4 and 8 months of age.

Discrimination of fearful and happy body postures in 8-month-old infants: an event-related potential study

“…That is, adults’ emotion recognition rates from inverted body expressions are still above chance. Similarly, in prior ERP work with infants (Missana et al, 2014a) using dynamic body expressions, while there was a significant main effect of emotion (fearful, happy), no evidence for an interaction between the emotion and orientation (upright, inverted) was obtained, which is probably to do with the fact that ERP modulations occurred in a similar direction for upright and inverted displays of emotion. However, further analysis revealed that only in the upright condition did infants’ neural responses discriminate between emotions (Missana et al, 2014a).…”

“…Similarly, in prior ERP work with infants (Missana et al, 2014a) using dynamic body expressions, while there was a significant main effect of emotion (fearful, happy), no evidence for an interaction between the emotion and orientation (upright, inverted) was obtained, which is probably to do with the fact that ERP modulations occurred in a similar direction for upright and inverted displays of emotion. However, further analysis revealed that only in the upright condition did infants’ neural responses discriminate between emotions (Missana et al, 2014a). We hypothesized that neural evidence for emotion discrimination is related to the orientation of the body; however, given previous findings, we expected that this effect might not be directly reflected in a significant interaction between stimulus orientation and emotion.…”

“…Critically, these effects were specific to body expressions presented in an upright orientation, since infants did not show any difference in their looking responses when the body expression was presented upside-down (Zieber et al, 2014). While these findings provide first insights into infants’ perceptual sensitivity to emotional body expressions, a number of vital remaining issues were addressed in a recent ERP study (Missana et al, 2014a). …”

“…In this study Missana et al (2014a) investigated the developmental emergence of infants’ neural sensitivity to emotional body expressions by presenting 4- and 8-month-olds with upright and inverted happy and fearful dynamic body expressions using point-light displays (PLDs). This ERP study yielded three main findings with respect to infants’ developing sensitivity to emotional body expressions.…”

“…Given what has been shown in recent work (Missana et al, 2014a; Zieber et al, 2014), another important question that arises is, once infants are sensitive to body expressions, how flexible are they in detecting them? Specifically, can infants discriminate between emotional body expressions in the absence of motion cues like adults can (Atkinson et al, 2004; de Gelder et al, 2004; Stekelenburg and de Gelder, 2004; Atkinson et al, 2012)?…”