Liat Israeli-Ran, Florina Uzefovsky Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel
The ability to recognize and understand others’ emotions is an early-developing basic social ability which predicts important child outcomes such as higher prosocial behavior and lower behavior problems. Research in adults shows that they tend to recognize happy expressions faster and with higher accuracy than other types of emotions, but it is unclear whether this is the case for infants. Therefore, the goal of the current study was to investigate the characteristics of emotion recognition of happy and sad facial expressions in infants. differences in recognition between positive and negative emotions during infancy. Data were collected from May to August 2020 from 138 infants (age: M = 13.6±2.43 months, ,47% female). The infants preformed a cross-modal emotion recognition task. In this task, two images of a woman expressing an emotion (happy/sad/neutral) are shown and accompanied by a vocal expression of emotion, corresponding to one of the facial expressions (laughing / crying) for 10 seconds. The dependent variable is looking-time at the congruent picture. The mean %looking-time to the congruent picture (typically interpreted as a sign of emotion recognition) was significantly longer (t(137)=5.83,p=.000, congruent: M= 0.44± 0.053 , incongruent: M= 0.39 ± 0.05 ). Additionally, looking-time to the positive congruent picture is significantly longer (t(137)=5.82,p=.000, positive : M= 0.47± 0.09 , negative: M= 0.41 ± 0.08 ). Although infants recognize positive and negative emotions well, they tend to look longer at happy expressions. It may indicate that recognizing positive emotions is a more positive experience or is easier.
