Are max-specified infant facial expressions during face-to-face interaction consistent with differential emotions theory?

Differential emotions theory (DET) proposes that infant facial expressions of emotions are differentiated. To test this hypothesis, the authors examined infant facial expressions longitudinally at 2, 4, and 6 mo of age during face-to-face play and a "still-face" interaction with their mothers. Infant expressions were coded using the Maximally Discriminative Facial Movement Coding System (Max). Consistent with DET, discrete positive expressions occurred more of the time and were of longer duration than blended expressions of positive affect. Contrary to DET, at no age did the proportions or durations of discrete and blended negative expressions differ, and they showed different patterns of developmental change. One is led to either reject or revise DET or else question the adequacy of the Max system. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hemispheric aymmetries in adults' perception of infant emotional expressions.

Accounts of emotion lateralization propose either overall right hemisphere (RH) advantage or differential RH vs left hemisphere (LH) involvement depending on the negative–positive valence of emotions. Perceptual studies generally show RH specialization. Yet viewer emotional responses may enhance valence effects. Because infant faces elicit heightened emotion in viewers, perceptual asymmetries with chimeric infant faces were assessed. First, it was determined that chimeras must be paired with their counterparts, not their mirror images, to tap viewers' sensitivity to adult facial asymmetries. Results showed an RH perceptual bias for infant cries but bihemispheric sensitivity to asymmetries in infant smiles. This effect was not due to LH featural vs RH holistic processing and held for additional, intensity-matched, spontaneous expressions. Specialized RH sensitivity to infant cries may reflect an evolutionary advantage for rapid response to infant distress. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The expression of determination: Similarities between anger and approach-related positive affect.

In this set of studies, we examine the perceptual similarities between emotions that share either a valence or a motivational direction. Determination is a positive approach-related emotion, whereas anger is a negative approach-related emotion. Thus, determination and anger share a motivational direction but are opposite in valence. An implemental mind-set has previously been shown to produce high-approach-motivated positive affect. Thus, in Study 1, participants were asked to freely report the strongest emotion they experienced during an implemental mind-set. The most common emotion reported was determination. On the basis of this result, we compared the facial expression of determination with that of anger. In Study 2, naive judges were asked to identify photographs of facial expressions intended to express determination, along with photographs intended to express basic emotions (joy, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, neutral). Correct identifications of intended determination expressions were correlated with misidentifications of the expressions as anger but not with misidentifications as any other emotion. This suggests that determination, a high-approach-motivated positive affect, is perceived as similar to anger. In Study 3, naive judges quantified the intensity of joy, anger, and determination expressed in photographs. The intensity of perceived determination was directly correlated with the intensity of perceived anger (a high-approach-motivated negative affect) and was inversely correlated with the intensity of perceived joy (a low-approach-motivated positive affect). These results demonstrate perceptual similarity between emotions that share a motivational direction but differ in valence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of Direct and Averted Gaze on the Perception of Facially Communicated Emotion.

Research has largely neglected the effects of gaze direction cues on the perception of facial expressions of emotion. It was hypothesized that when gaze direction matches the underlying behavioral intent (approach-avoidance) communicated by an emotional expression, the perception of that emotion would be enhanced (i.e., shared signal hypothesis). Specifically, the authors expected that (a) direct gaze would enhance the perception of approach-oriented emotions (anger and joy) and (b) averted eye gaze would enhance the perception of avoidance-oriented emotions (fear and sadness). Three studies supported this hypothesis. Study 1 examined emotional trait attributions made to neutral faces. Study 2 examined ratings of ambiguous facial blends of anger and fear. Study 3 examined the influence of gaze on the perception of highly prototypical expressions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The ontogeny and significance of infants' facial expressions in the first 9 months of life.

Four studies examined aspects of the differential emotions theory (DET) hypothesis of expressive behavior development. In Study 1, facial-expressive movements of 108 2.5–9-mo-old infants were video recorded in positive and negative mother–infant interactions (conditions). As expected, Max-specified full-face and partial expressions of interest, joy, sadness, and anger were morphologically stable between the 2 ages. Studies 1 and 2 confirmed predicted differential responding to mother sadness and anger expressions and to composite positive and negative conditions. Discrete negative expressions exceeded negative blends, and the amount of both expression types remained stable across ages. Studies 3 and 4 provided varying degrees of support for the social validity of Max-specified infant negative affect expressions. Conclusions include revisions and clarifications of DET. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Infants' responses to their mothers' expressions of joy and sadness.

On separate visits to the laboratory, 36 nine-month-old infants (18 boys and 18 girls) watched their mothers express joy or sadness, facially and vocally, during a 2-min emotion-induction period. After the induction period, mothers continued to express joy or sadness while their infants played with four sets of toys. Infant emotion expressions were analyzed using the Max (Izard, 1979a) and Affex (Izard, Dougherty, & Hembree, 1983) coding systems, and infant play behavior was coded with a system developed by Belsky and Most (1981). The amount of time that the infants looked at their mothers was also measured. Findings were generally consistent with differential emotions theory (Izard, 1979b). The infants expressed more joy and looked longer at their mothers during the joy condition and they showed more sadness, anger, and gaze aversion during the sadness condition. The infants engaged in more play behavior in the joy condition than in the sadness condition. Regression analyses revealed several significant relations between infants' gaze behavior, emotion expressions, and play behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Le décodage de l'expression faciale des émotions au cours de l'enfance.

The ability to perceive and interpret facial expressions of emotion improves throughout childhood. Although newborns have rudimentary perceptive abilities allowing them to distinguish several facial expressions, it is only at the end of the first year that infants seem to be able to assign meaning to emotional signals. The meaning infants assign to facial expressions is very broad, as it is limited to the judgment of emotional valence. Meaning becomes more specific between the second and the third year of life, as children begin to categorize facial signals in terms of discrete emotions. While the facial expressions of happiness, anger and sadness are accurately categorized by the third year, the categorization of expressions of fear, surprise and disgust shows a much slower developmental pattern. Moreover, the ability to judge the sincerity of facial expressions shows a slower developmental pattern, probably because of the subtle differences between genuine and non-genuine expressions. The available evidence indicates that school age children can distinguish genuine smiles from masked smiles and false smiles. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Japanese and American infants' responses to arm restraint.

Five- and 12-mo-old Japanese and American infants participated in a nonpainful arm restraint procedure. Facial responses were scored with an anatomically based coding system (Baby FACS, an adaptation for infants of the Facial Action Coding System [FACS; P. Ekman and W. Friesen, 1978]). Nonfacial body activity (struggling) and negative vocalizations also were scored. Results showed that older infants' latencies to negative response were shorter than those of younger infants, and older infants produced proportionately more negative facial behavior. In addition, 5-mo-old American infants produced criterion negative facial expressions more quickly than 5-mo-old Japanese infants. However, infants of both cultures at both ages eventually produced similar facial configurations and nonfacial behaviors. These findings support the hypothesis that infants' emotional facial expressions are universal. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Seeing yourself helps you see others.

It has been proposed that self-face representations are involved in interpreting facial emotions of others. We experimentally primed participants' self-face representations. In Study 1, we assessed eye tracking patterns and performance on a facial emotion discrimination task, and in Study 2, we assessed emotion ratings between self and nonself groups. Results show that experimental priming of self-face representations increases visual exploration of faces, facilitates the speed of facial expression processing, and increases the emotional distance between expressions. These findings suggest that the ability to interpret facial expressions of others is intimately associated with the representations we have of our own faces. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The induced affect response: 10-week-old infants' responses to three emotion expressions.

Responses to mothers' presentations of happy, sad, and angry faces were studied in a sample of 12 infants, 6 boys and 6 girls at age 10 weeks?±?5 days. Each infant's mother displayed noncontingent, practiced facial and vocal expressions of the 3 emotions. Each expression occurred 4 times, with a 20-s head-turn-away between presentations. The orders of presentation were randomly assigned within sex of infant. Mothers' and infants' facial behaviors were coded using the Maximally Discriminative Facial Movement Coding System. The data indicated that (a) the infants discriminated each emotion, (b) apparent matching responses may occur under some conditions but not all, and (c) these apparent matching responses were only a part of nonrandom behavior patterns indicating induced emotional or affective responses of infants to mothers' expressions. (36 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recognition of facial expressions of emotions by 3-year-olds.

Very few large-scale studies have focused on emotional facial expression recognition (FER) in 3-year-olds, an age of rapid social and language development. We studied FER in 808 healthy 3-year-olds using verbal and nonverbal computerized tasks for four basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, and fear). Three-year-olds showed differential performance on the verbal and nonverbal FER tasks, especially with respect to fear. That is to say, fear was one of the most accurately recognized facial expressions as matched nonverbally and the least accurately recognized facial expression as labeled verbally. Sex did not influence emotion-matching nor emotion-labeling performance after adjusting for basic matching or labeling ability. Three-year-olds made systematic errors in emotion-labeling. Namely, happy expressions were often confused with fearful expressions, whereas negative expressions were often confused with other negative expressions. Together, these findings suggest that 3-year-olds' FER skills strongly depend on task specifications. Importantly, fear was the most sensitive facial expression in this regard. Finally, in line with previous studies, we found that recognized emotion categories are initially broad, including emotions of the same valence, as reflected in the nonrandom errors of 3-year-olds. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Couples Emotion Rating Form: Psychometric properties and theoretical associations.

The Couples Emotion Rating Form assesses 3 types of negative emotion that are salient during times of relationship conflict. Hard emotion includes feeling angry and aggravated, soft emotion includes feeling hurt and sad, and flat emotion includes feeling bored and indifferent. In Study 1, scales measuring hard and soft emotion were validated by observation of 82 married couples in a series of conflict conversations. Self-report ratings for each emotion corresponded with observer ratings of the same emotion, and the emotion scales produced expected correlations with negative affect. In Study 2, a measure of flat emotion was added to the instrument, and 1,239 married people completed questionnaires. The rating form fit an expected 3-dimensional factor structure, and each scale correlated with a set of theoretically linked constructs. Hard emotion was associated with power assertion, pursuit of self-centered goals, and negative communication. Soft emotion was associated with expressions of vulnerability, pursuit of prosocial goals, and positive communication. Flat emotion was distinct from other emotions in being associated with withdrawal. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

12-month-old infants allocate increased neural resources to stimuli associated with negative adult emotion.

Young infants use caregivers' emotional expressions to guide their behavior in novel, ambiguous situations. This skill, known as social referencing, likely involves at least 3 separate abilities: (a) looking at an adult in an unfamiliar situation, (b) associating that adult's emotion with the novel situation, and (c) regulating their own emotions in response to the adult's emotional display. The authors measured each of these elements individually as well as how they related to each other. The results revealed that 12-month-olds allocated more attention, as indicated by event-related potential measures, to stimuli associated with negative adult emotion than to those associated with positive or neutral emotion. Infants' interaction with their caregiver was affected by adult emotional displays. In addition, how quickly infants referenced an adult predicted both their brain activity in response to pictures of stimuli associated with negative emotion as well as some aspects of their behavior regulation. The results are discussed with respect to their significance for understanding why infants reference and regulate their behavior in response to adult emotion. Suggestions for further research are provided. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

You never think about my feelings: Interpersonal dominance as a predictor of emotion decoding accuracy.

Dominance and submission constitute fundamentally different social interaction strategies that may be enacted most effectively to the extent that the emotions of others are relatively ignored (dominance) versus noticed (submission). On the basis of such considerations, we hypothesized a systematic relationship between chronic tendencies toward high versus low levels of interpersonal dominance and emotion decoding accuracy in objective tasks. In two studies (total N = 232), interpersonally dominant individuals exhibited poorer levels of emotion recognition in response to audio and video clips (Study 1) and facial expressions of emotion (Study 2). The results provide a novel perspective on interpersonal dominance, suggest its strategic nature (Study 2), and are discussed in relation to Fiske's (1993) social–cognitive theory of power. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attention and reaction to distress in infancy: A longitudinal study.

The primary aim of this study was to verify whether early individual differences in look duration are related to general mechanisms of the infant nervous system that draw together attention and emotion. Thirty-one infants were observed at 3, 5, and 11 months of age. Facial expressions of pain and distress were observed by means of C. Izard's (1979) Maximally Discriminative Facial Movement Coding System 90 s after routine pediatric vaccinations. Several measures of visual attention were taken experimentally in a separate testing session. Significant correlations between measures of attention and duration of facial expressions of pain and distress were found at each age level. Infants who showed pain or distress for a shorter time period also paid attention for a shorter time period and vice versa. The main conclusion is that individual differences combining control of both pain and attention can be identified from early infancy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intact recognition of facial emotion in Parkinson's disease.

Although the basal ganglia have been shown to be critical for the expression of emotion in prosody and facial expressions, it is unclear whether they are also critical for recognition of emotions. Selective pathology of parts of the basal ganglia is a hallmark of individuals with Parkinson's disease, and such patients have been examined in several studies of emotion. We examined 18 patients with Parkinson's disease (11 men, 7 women) and 13 age-, education-, gender ratio-, and IQ-matched normal controls on their ability to recognize emotions signaled by facial expressions. Parkinson's patients performed entirely normally on a quantitative task of recognizing emotional facial expressions. The findings do not support the notion that the sectors of basal ganglia that are dysfunctional in Parkinson's disease are essential for recognizing emotion in facial expressions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When frustration is repeated: Behavioral and emotion responses during extinction over time.

Persistence of instrumental responding and negative facial expressions in response to repeated goal blockage was studied in 53 4-month-old infants. All participants experienced 2 sessions comprising baseline (no stimulation), contingency (stimulation resulting from infant action), and extinction (no stimulation) on consecutive days. Performance criteria identified 2 groups of infants, those who learned in Session 1 (Learning Group 1) and those who learned in Session 2 (Learning Group 2). Individual differences in instrumental responses and facial expression during extinction were compared as a function of learning group. Across sessions, the repetition of extinction for Learning Group 1 was associated with both a persistent instrumental response and anger expressions. The level of instrumental response and anger expression was equivalent to that observed for Learning Group 2 but only in Session 2, the day on which that group learned. Sadness and anger/sadness blended expressions were initially more common in Learning Group 2, but these expressions were attenuated given another exposure to the contingency in Session 2. Implications for the relations among infant emotion, cognition, and behavior are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age-related changes in the integration of gaze direction and facial expressions of emotion.

Gaze direction influences younger adults' perception of emotional expressions, with direct gaze enhancing the perception of anger and joy, while averted gaze enhances the perception of fear. Age-related declines in emotion recognition and eye-gaze processing have been reported, indicating that there may be age-related changes in the ability to integrate these facial cues. As there is evidence of a positivity bias with age, age-related difficulties integrating these cues may be greatest for negative emotions. The present research investigated age differences in the extent to which gaze direction influenced explicit perception (e.g., anger, fear and joy; Study 1) and social judgments (e.g., of approachability; Study 2) of emotion faces. Gaze direction did not influence the perception of fear in either age group. In both studies, age differences were found in the extent to which gaze direction influenced judgments of angry and joyful faces, with older adults showing less integration of gaze and emotion cues than younger adults. Age differences were greatest when interpreting angry expressions. Implications of these findings for older adults' social functioning are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)