Infant differential behavioral responding to discrete emotions

Effects of conflicting emotional cues on toddlers' emotion perception

The communication of emotion is dynamic and occurs across multiple channels, such as facial expression and tone of voice. When cues are in conflict, interpreting emotion can become challenging. Here, we examined the effects of incongruent emotional cues on toddlers' interpretation of emotions. We presented 33 children (22-26 months, Mage = 23.8 months, 15 female) with side-by-side images of faces along with sentences spoken in a tone of voice that conflicted with semantic content. One of the two faces matched the emotional tone of the audio, whereas the other matched the semantic content. For both congruent and incongruent trials, toddlers showed no overall looking preference to either type of face stimuli. However, during the second exposure to the sentences of incongruent trials, older children tended to look longer to the face matching semantic content when listening to happy vs. angry content. Results inform our understanding of the early development of complex emotion understanding.

Witness for resolution: post-conflict quadratic affiliation in semi-free ranging pigs

In social mammals, post-conflict resolution can involve the reunion of former opponents (reconciliation), spontaneous/solicited post-conflict affiliation of a third party with either opponent (triadic contacts), and affiliation between other individuals (hereafter bystanders; quadratic contacts). Quadratic contacts-possibly informing complex cognitive abilities-have been neglected in post-conflict studies. We investigated quadratic affiliation in semi-free ranging pigs Sus scrofa, at the ethical farm Parva-Domus (Cavagnolo, Italy). Kinship was known. We collected behavioral data on adult pigs (n = 104) via video recordings (43 h) followed by video analyses. Affiliative and anxiety behaviors between bystanders were collected under post-conflict (PC; following a conflict between non-bystanders) and matched-control (MC; no conflict) conditions. Quadratic affiliation was present in pigs, as bystanders affiliated more in PC than MC, and such affiliation was followed by a decrease in the anxiety behaviors of both the interacting bystanders. Thus, quadratic contacts may be partly aimed at reducing one's own anxiety (intrinsic regulation). Quadratic affiliation was highest between closely related bystanders, which suggests that such affiliation may be most effective when close kin is involved. Quadratic affiliation was lowest after reconciliation and spontaneous triadic contacts. This suggests that direct peacemaking between opponents and spontaneous triadic contacts with close kin may most likely replace quadratic affiliation. Hence, pigs can be influenced by the negative events that affect other pigs-but not themselves-and their response may be modulated by social factors. Such non-random quadratic affiliation may point toward the presence of elements of social appraisal abilities in pigs.

We (Still!) Need to Talk About Valence: Contemporary Issues and Recommendations for Affective Science

Valence is central to the experience of emotion. However, to the detriment of affective science, it is often ill-defined and poorly operationalized. Being more precise about what is meant by valence would make for more readily comparable emotion stimuli, methodologies, and results, and would promote consideration of the diversity, complexity, and function of discrete emotions. This brief review uses prior literature and an informal survey of affective scientists to illustrate disagreements in conceptualizing valence. Next, we describe issues of valence in affective science, particularly as they pertain to the emotion process, the functions of emotion, and precision in empirical research. We conclude by providing recommendations for the future of valence in affective science.

Labeling and Describing Discrete Emotions in Early Childhood: A Relational Approach

Emotion understanding involves appreciating the significance of the relational context; the "aboutness" of the emotion. This study examined how children labeled emotions and described relational elements of discrete emotion contexts. Preschool children (3.5-year-olds, n = 22; 4.5-year-olds, n = 23) described images of 5 emotion contexts (anger, sadness, disgust, fear, and joy). Researchers assessed children's (1) correct labeling of discrete emotions, and (2) differential mentioning of the emoter (person displaying the emotion) and the referent (the elicitor of the emotion) across discrete emotions. Children's pattern of accurately labeling discrete emotions was similar to prior research, with both age groups correctly labeled anger, sadness, and joy more often than disgust or fear. Novel to the present study, we found that older children differentially highlighted emotional elements (i.e., the emoter, the referent) when describing discrete emotion contexts. Specifically, 4.5-year-olds emphasized the emoter more when describing anger, sadness, and joy than fear and disgust contexts, and mentioned the referent more in disgust, fear, and joy than anger and sadness contexts. Differential emphasis of relational elements was not observed for 3.5-year-olds. These findings highlight the importance of examining children's appreciation of relational contexts and indicate important differences in how children differentially emphasize relational elements when viewing discrete emotion contexts. Potential developmental mechanisms, opportunities for further empirical research, and implications for emotion theory are discussed.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-022-00170-1.

Domestic pigs (Sus scrofa) engage in non-random post-conflict affiliation with third parties: cognitive and functional implications

In social mammals, conflict resolution involves the reunion of former opponents (aggressor and victim) after an aggressive event (reconciliation) or post-conflict triadic contacts with a third party, started by either opponent (solicited-TSC) or spontaneously offered by the third party (unsolicited-TUC). These post-conflict strategies can serve different functions, including consolation (specifically when TUCs reduce the victim's anxiety). We investigated the possible presence and modulating factors of such strategies on semi-free ranging pigs (Sus scrofa; N = 104), housed at the ethical farm Parva Domus (Cavagnolo, Italy). Kinship was known. Reconciliation was present and mainly occurred between weakly related pigs to possibly improve tolerant cohabitation. Triadic contacts (all present except aggressor TSCs) mostly occurred between close kin. TSCs enacted by victims reduced neither their post-conflict anxiety behaviors nor further attacks by the previous aggressor, possibly because TSCs remained largely unreciprocated. TUCs towards aggressors did not reduce aggressor post-conflict anxiety but limited aggression redirection towards third parties. TUCs towards the victim reduced the victim but not the third-party's anxiety. However, TUCs may also provide inclusive fitness benefits to third parties by benefiting close kin. In sum, pigs engaged in non-random solicited/unsolicited triadic contacts, which suggests that pigs might possess socio-emotional regulation abilities to change their own or others' experience and elements of social appraisal, necessary to detect the emotional arousal of relevant others and (in case of TUCs) take the agency to restore homeostasis.

What underlies emotion regulation abilities? An innovative programme based on an integrative developmental approach to improve emotional competencies: Promising results in children with Prader-Willi syndrome

BACKGROUND

This study aimed to test the effect of a new training programme on emotional competencies, named EMO-T, and to show the value of an integrative developmental approach. This approach postulates that the emotion regulation disturbances commonly observed in neurodevelopmental disorders are the consequence of potential disruptions in the prerequisite emotion skills. This integrative approach is particularly suitable in the case of complex and multidimensional disorders such as Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS), a rare genetic disease.

METHODS

We examined the emotion expression, recognition, comprehension, and regulation skills in 25 PWS children aged 5-10 and 50 typically developing children (TD) aged 3-10. After a pre-test session, half of the PWS children participated in the EMO-T programme with their regular therapist for 6 weeks, while the other half continued their usual rehabilitation programme. Two post-test sessions were conducted, one at the end of the programme and one 3 months later.

RESULTS

At pre-test, PWS children displayed a deficit in the four emotional competencies (EC). PWS children who participated in the EMO-T programme showed a significant and sustainable post-test improvement regarding voluntary expression and emotion recognition abilities, such that the level reached was no longer different from the baseline level of TD children. They also tended to improve in their emotion regulation, although they received no specific training in this skill.

DISCUSSION

These results support that emotion regulation abilities require prerequisite emotion skills, which should be more fully considered in current training programmes. Because emotion regulation disorders strongly impact all areas of life, an integrative developmental approach appears crucial especially in the case of neurodevelopmental disorders. Further studies should be conducted to explore this perspective.

Toddler Word Learning is Robust to Changes in Emotional Context

Word learning is a crucial aspect of early social and cognitive development, and previous research indicates that children's word learning is influenced by the context in which the word is spoken. However, the role of emotions as contextual cues to word learning remains less clear. The present study investigated word learning among 2.5-year-old children in angry, happy, sad, and variable emotional contexts. Fifty-six children (30 female; Mean age=2.49 years) participated in a novel noun generalization task in which children observed an experimenter labeling objects in either a consistently angry, consistently happy, consistently sad, or variable (one exemplar per emotion) context. Children were then asked to identify the label-object association. Results revealed that children's performance was above chance levels for all four conditions (all t's>3.68, all p's<.01), but performance did not significantly differ by condition (F(3,52)=0.51, p=.677). These results provide valuable information regarding potential boundaries for when contextual information may versus may not influence children's word learning.

Linguistic and developmental influences on superordinate facial configuration categorization in infancy

Humans perceive emotions in terms of categories, such as "happiness," "sadness," and "anger." To learn these complex conceptual emotion categories, humans must first be able to perceive regularities in expressive behaviors (e.g., facial configurations) across individuals. Recent research suggests that infants spontaneously form "basic-level" categories of facial configurations (e.g., happy vs. fear), but not "superordinate" categories of facial configurations (e.g., positive vs. negative). The current studies further explore how infant age and language impact superordinate categorization of facial configurations associated with different negative emotions. Across all experiments, infants were habituated to one person displaying facial configurations associated with anger and disgust. While 10-month-olds formed a category of person identity (Experiment 1), 14-month-olds formed a category that included negative facial configurations displayed by the same person (Experiment 2). However, neither age formed the hypothesized superordinate category of negative valence. When a verbal label ("toma") was added to each of the habituation events (Experiment 3), 10-month-olds formed a category similar to 14-month-olds in Experiment 2. These findings intersect a larger conversation about the nature and development of children's emotion categories and highlight the importance of considering developmental processes, such as language learning and attentional/memory development, in the design and interpretation of infant categorization studies.

Associations between brain and behavioral processing of facial expressions of emotion and sensory reactivity in young children

The ability to decode and accurately identify information from facial emotions may advantage young children socially. This capacity to decode emotional information may likewise be influenced by individual differences in children's temperament. This study investigated whether sensory reactivity and perceptual awareness, two dimensions of temperament, as well as children's ability to accurately label emotions relates to the neural processing of emotional content in faces. Event related potentials (ERPs) of 4 to 6 year-old children (N  = 119) were elicited from static displays of anger, happy, fearful, sad, and neutral emotion faces. Children, as a group, exhibited differential early (N290) and mid-latency (P400) event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to facial expressions of emotion. Individual differences in children's sensory reactivity were associated with enhanced P400 amplitudes to neutral, sad, and fearful faces. In a separate task, children were asked to provide an emotional label for the same images. Interestingly, children less accurately labeled the same neutral, sad, and fearful faces, suggesting that, contrary to previous work showing enhanced attentional processing to threatening cues (i.e., fear), children higher in sensory reactivity may deploy more attentional resources when decoding ambiguous emotional cues.

Early Adversity and Emotion Processing From Faces: A Meta-analysis on Behavioral and Neurophysiological Responses

BACKGROUND

Although the link between early adversity (EA) and later-life psychiatric disorders is well established, it has yet to be elucidated whether EA is related to distortions in the processing of different facial expressions. We conducted a meta-analysis to investigate whether exposure to EA relates to distortions in responses to different facial emotions at three levels: 1) event-related potentials of the P100 and N170, 2) amygdala functional magnetic resonance imaging responses, and 3) accuracy rate or reaction time in behavioral data.

METHODS

The systematic literature search (PubMed and Web of Science) up to April 2020 resulted in 29 behavioral studies (n = 8555), 32 functional magnetic resonance imaging studies (n = 2771), and 3 electroencephalography studies (n = 197) for random-effect meta-analyses.

RESULTS

EA was related to heightened bilateral amygdala reactivity to sad faces (but not other facial emotions). Exposure to EA was related to faster reaction time but a normal accuracy rate in response to angry and sad faces. In response to fearful and happy faces, EA was related to a lower accuracy rate only in individuals with recent EA exposure. This effect was more pronounced in individuals with exposure to EA before (vs. after) the age of 3 years. These findings were independent of psychiatric diagnoses. Because of the low number of eligible electroencephalography studies, no conclusions could be reached regarding the effect of EA on the event-related potentials.

CONCLUSIONS

EA relates to alterations in behavioral and neurophysiological processing of facial emotions. Our study stresses the importance of assessing age at exposure and time since EA because these factors mediate some EA-related perturbations.

The Development of Emotion Reasoning in Infancy and Early Childhood

Historically, research characterizing the development of emotion recognition has focused on identifying specific skills and the age periods, or milestones, at which these abilities emerge. However, advances in emotion research raise questions about whether this conceptualization accurately reflects how children learn about, understand, and respond to others’ emotions in everyday life. In this review, we propose a developmental framework for the emergence of emotion reasoning—that is, how children develop the ability to make reasonably accurate inferences and predictions about the emotion states of other people. We describe how this framework holds promise for building upon extant research. Our review suggests that use of the term emotion recognition can be misleading and imprecise, with the developmental processes of interest better characterized by the term emotion reasoning. We also highlight how the age at which children succeed on many tasks reflects myriad developmental processes. This new framing of emotional development can open new lines of inquiry about how humans learn to navigate their social worlds.

Factors Facilitating Early Emotion Understanding Development: Contributions to Individual Differences

Children's emotion understanding is crucial for healthy social and academic development. The behaviors influenced by emotion understanding in childhood have received much attention, but less focus has been placed on factors that may predict individual differences in emotion understanding, the principle issue addressed in the current review. A more thorough understanding of the developmental underpinnings of this skill may allow for better prediction of emotion understanding, and for interventions to improve emotion understanding early in development. Here, we present theoretical arguments for the substantial roles of three aspects of children's environments in development of emotion understanding: family expressiveness, discussions about emotions, and language development, and we discuss how these are interrelated. Ultimately, this may aid in predicting the effects of environmental influences on development of emotion understanding more broadly, and the mechanisms by which they do so.

Young children's developing ability to integrate gestural and emotional cues

In three studies, children aged 22 to 46 months (N = 180) needed to integrate pointing gestures or gaze cues with positive and negative facial expressions to succeed in an object-choice task. Finding a toy required children to either choose (positive expression) or avoid (negative expression) the indicated target. Study 1 showed that 22-month-olds are better at integrating a positive facial expression with a pointing gesture compared with a negative facial expression with a pointing gesture. Study 2 tracked the integration of negative expressions and pointing across development, finding an unexpected, U-shaped trajectory with group-level success only at 46 months. Study 3 showed that already 34-month-olds succeeded when pointing was replaced with communicative gaze. These findings suggest that at the end of the second year of life, children are generally able to integrate emotional displays and communicative cues such as gestures and ostensive gaze to reevaluate and contextualize utterances. In addition, pointing gestures appear to be understood by young children as a call to act on a referenced object. Findings illustrate that communicative cues should be studied in conjunction with emotional displays to draw an ecologically valid picture of communicative development.

Interactive situations reveal more about children's emotional knowledge

Research examining children's emotion judgments has generally used nonsocial tasks that do not resemble children's daily experiences in judging others' emotions. Here, younger children (4- to 6-year-olds) and older children (7- to 9-year-olds) participated in a socially interactive task where an experimenter opened boxes and made an expression (happy, sad, scared, or disgust) based on the object inside. Children guessed which of four objects (a sticker, a broken toy car, a spider, or toy poop) was in the box. Subsequently, children opened a set of boxes and generated facial expressions for the experimenter. Children also labeled the emotion elicited by the objects and static facial expressions. Children's ability to guess which object caused the experimenter's expression increased with age but did not predict their ability to generate a recognizable expression. Children's demonstration of emotion knowledge also varied across tasks, suggesting that when emotion judgment tasks more closely mimic their daily experiences, children demonstrate broader emotion knowledge.

Superordinate categorization of negative facial expressions in infancy: The influence of labels

Accurate perception of emotional (facial) expressions is an essential social skill. It is currently debated whether emotion categorization in infancy emerges in a "broad-to-narrow" pattern and the degree to which language influences this process. We used an habituation paradigm to explore (a) whether 14- and 18-month-old infants perceive different facial expressions (anger, sad, disgust) as belonging to a superordinate category of negative valence and (b) how verbal labels influence emotion category formation. Results indicated that infants did not spontaneously form a superordinate category of negative valence (Experiments 1 and 3). However, when a novel label ("toma") was added to each event during habituation trials (Experiments 2 and 4), infants formed this superordinate valance category when habituated to disgust and sad expressions (but not when habituated to anger and sadness). These labeling effects were obtained with two stimuli sets (Radboud Face Database and NimStim), even when controlling for the presence of teeth in the expressions. The results indicate that infants, at 14 and 18 months of age, show limited superordinate categorization based on the valence of different negative facial expressions. Specifically, infants only form this abstract emotion category when labels were provided, and the labeling effect depends on which emotions are presented during habituation. These findings have important implications for developmental theories of emotion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Did you mean to do that? Infants use emotional communication to infer and re-enact others' intended actions

Infants readily re-enact others' intended actions during the second year of life. However, the role of emotion in appreciating others' intentions and how this understanding develops in infancy remains unstudied. In the present study, 15- and 18-month-old infants observed an experimenter repeatedly attempt but fail to produce a target action on an object and express either frustration or neutral affect after each attempt. Analyses of infants' responses revealed that 18-month-old infants, but not 15-month-olds, produced more target actions in the frustration condition than the neutral condition. These results suggest that infants use emotional communication to disambiguate and re-enact others' intended actions and that this ability develops in the second year of life.

The Development of Negative Event-Emotion Matching in Infancy: Implications for Theories in Affective Science

Predicting another person's emotional response to a situation is an important component of emotion concept understanding. However, little is known about the developmental origins of this ability. The current studies examine whether 10-month-olds expect facial configurations/vocalizations associated with negative emotions (e.g., anger, disgust) to be displayed after specific eliciting events. In Experiment 1, 10-month-olds (N = 60) were familiarized to an Emoter interacting with objects in a positive event (Toy Given) and a negative event (Toy Taken). Infants expected the Emoter to display a facial configuration associated with anger after the negative event, but did not expect the Emoter to display a facial configuration associated with happiness after the positive event. In Experiment 2, 10- and 14-month-olds (N = 120) expected the Emoter to display a facial configuration associated with anger, rather than one associated with disgust, after an "anger-eliciting" event (Toy Taken). However, only the 14-month-olds provided some evidence of linking a facial configuration associated with disgust, rather than one associated with anger, to a "disgust-eliciting event" (New Food). Experiment 3 found that 10-month-olds (N = 60) did not expect an Emoter to display a facial configuration associated with anger after an "anger-eliciting" event involving an Unmet Goal. Together, these experiments suggest that infants start to refine broad concepts of affect into more precise emotion concepts over the first 2 years of life, before learning emotion language. These findings are a first step toward addressing a long-standing theoretical debate in affective science about the nature of early emotion concepts.

Progress in understanding the emergence of human emotion

In the past several decades, research on emotional development has flourished. Scientists have made progress in understanding infants', children's, and adults' abilities to recognize, communicate, and regulate their emotions. However, many questions remain unanswered or only partly answered. We are poised to move from descriptions of aspects of emotional functioning to conceptualizing and studying the developmental mechanisms that underlie those aspects. The gaps in our knowledge provide numerous opportunities for further investigation. With this special issue of Developmental Psychology, we aim to stimulate such progress, especially among colleagues at the beginning of their careers. The articles in this issue are intended to challenge our concepts and take research on emotional development in new directions. Toward this end, this special issue includes empirical studies, theoretical articles, novel conceptualizations, methodological innovations, and invited commentaries from scholars across a range of disciplines. In this introductory essay, we briefly review the history of research on emotional development and provide an overview of the contributions of this special issue with thoughts about the current state of the developmental science and areas in which further advancement on emotional development must be made. These include understanding the nature of emotion itself, identifying the mechanisms that produce developmental changes, examining emotion regulation within differing social contexts, and creating measures of culture that acknowledge globalization, historical change, and within-culture differences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Cross-modal emotion recognition and autism-like traits in typically developing children

The ability to explicitly recognize emotions develops gradually throughout childhood, and children usually have greater difficulty in recognizing emotions from the voice than from the face. However, little is known about how children integrate vocal and facial cues to recognize an emotion, particularly during mid to late childhood. Furthermore, children with an autism spectrum disorder often show a reduced ability to recognize emotions, especially when integrating emotion from multiple modalities. The current preliminary study explored the ability of typically developing children aged 7-9 years to match emotional tones of voice to facial expressions and whether this ability varies according to the level of autism-like traits. Overall, children were the least accurate when matching happy and fearful voices to faces, commonly pairing happy voices with angry faces and fearful voices with sad faces. However, the level of autism-like traits was not associated with matching accuracy. These results suggest that 7- to 9-year-old children have difficulty in integrating vocal and facial emotional expressions but that differences in cross-modal emotion matching in relation to the broader autism phenotype are not evident in this task for this age group with the current sample.

Adult Judges Use Heuristics When Categorizing Infants’ Naturally Occurring Responses to Others’ Emotions

Inferring the motivations of others is a fundamental aspect of social interaction. However, making such inferences about infants can be challenging. This investigation examined adults’ ability to infer the eliciting event of an infant’s behavior and what information adults utilize to make such inferences. In Study 1, adult participants viewed recordings of 24-month-old infants responding to an actor’s emotional display (joy, sadness, fear, anger, or disgust) toward a broken toy and were asked to infer which emotion the actor expressed using only the infant’s behavioral responses. Importantly, videos were blurred and muted to ensure that the only information available regarding the actor’s emotion was the infant’s reaction. Overall, adults were poor judges of the elicitors of infants’ behaviors with accuracy levels below 50%. However, adults’ categorizations appeared systematic, suggesting that they may have used consistently miscategorized emotions. To explore this possibility, a second study was conducted in which a separate sample of adults viewed the original recordings and were asked to identify infants’ goal-directed behaviors (i.e., security seeking, social avoidance, information seeking, prosocial behavior, exploration, relaxed play). Overall, adults perceived a variety of infant differentiated responses to discrete emotions. Furthermore, infants’ goal-directed behaviors were significantly associated with adults’ earlier “miscategorizations.” Infants who responded with specific behaviors were consistently categorized as having responded to specific emotions, such as prosocial behavior in response to sadnesss. Taken together, these results suggest that when explicit emotion information is unavailable, adults may use heuristics of emotional responsiveness to guide their categorizations of emotion elicitors.

Emotion Knowledge, Theory of Mind, and Language in Young Children: Testing a Comprehensive Conceptual Model

Numerous studies suggest that both emotion knowledge and language abilities are powerfully related to young children's theory of mind. Nonetheless, the magnitude and direction of the associations between language, emotion knowledge, and theory-of-mind performance in the first years of life are still debated. Hence, the aim of this study was to assess the direct effects of emotion knowledge and language on theory-of-mind scores in 2- and 3-year-old children. A sample of 139 children, aged between 24 and 47 months (M = 35.5 months; SD = 6.73), were directly administered measures of emotion knowledge, theory of mind, and language. We conducted structural equation modeling (SEM) to evaluate the effects of these variables within a single comprehensive framework, while also controlling for any effects of age and gender. The proposed structural equation model provided an excellent fit for the data, indicating that both children's emotion knowledge, and their language ability had direct positive effects on theory of mind scores. In addition, age was found to wield statistically significant effects on all the variables under study, whereas gender was not significantly associated with any of them. These findings suggest the importance of fostering young children's emotion knowledge and language ability with a view to enhancing their comprehension of mental states.

Do Preverbal Infants Understand Discrete Facial Expressions of Emotion?

An ongoing debate in affective science concerns whether certain discrete, “basic” emotions have evolutionarily based signals (facial expressions) that are easily, universally, and (perhaps) innately identified. Studies with preverbal infants (younger than 24 months) have the potential to shed light on this debate. This review summarizes what is known about preverbal infants’ understanding of discrete emotional facial expressions. Overall, while many studies suggest that preverbal infants differentiate positive and negative facial expressions, few studies have tested whether infants understand discrete emotions (e.g., anger vs. disgust). Moreover, results vary greatly based on methodological factors. This review also (a) discusses how language may influence the development of emotion understanding, and (b) proposes a new developmental hypothesis for infants’ discrete emotion understanding.

Mapping the Passions: Toward a High-Dimensional Taxonomy of Emotional Experience and Expression

What would a comprehensive atlas of human emotions include? For 50 years, scientists have sought to map emotion-related experience, expression, physiology, and recognition in terms of the "basic six"-anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. Claims about the relationships between these six emotions and prototypical facial configurations have provided the basis for a long-standing debate over the diagnostic value of expression (for review and latest installment in this debate, see Barrett et al., p. 1). Building on recent empirical findings and methodologies, we offer an alternative conceptual and methodological approach that reveals a richer taxonomy of emotion. Dozens of distinct varieties of emotion are reliably distinguished by language, evoked in distinct circumstances, and perceived in distinct expressions of the face, body, and voice. Traditional models-both the basic six and affective-circumplex model (valence and arousal)-capture a fraction of the systematic variability in emotional response. In contrast, emotion-related responses (e.g., the smile of embarrassment, triumphant postures, sympathetic vocalizations, blends of distinct expressions) can be explained by richer models of emotion. Given these developments, we discuss why tests of a basic-six model of emotion are not tests of the diagnostic value of facial expression more generally. Determining the full extent of what facial expressions can tell us, marginally and in conjunction with other behavioral and contextual cues, will require mapping the high-dimensional, continuous space of facial, bodily, and vocal signals onto richly multifaceted experiences using large-scale statistical modeling and machine-learning methods.

What the face displays: Mapping 28 emotions conveyed by naturalistic expression

What emotions do the face and body express? Guided by new conceptual and quantitative approaches (Cowen, Elfenbein, Laukka, & Keltner, 2018; Cowen & Keltner, 2017, 2018), we explore the taxonomy of emotion recognized in facial-bodily expression. Participants (N = 1,794; 940 female, ages 18-76 years) judged the emotions captured in 1,500 photographs of facial-bodily expression in terms of emotion categories, appraisals, free response, and ecological validity. We find that facial-bodily expressions can reliably signal at least 28 distinct categories of emotion that occur in everyday life. Emotion categories, more so than appraisals such as valence and arousal, organize emotion recognition. However, categories of emotion recognized in naturalistic facial and bodily behavior are not discrete but bridged by smooth gradients that correspond to continuous variations in meaning. Our results support a novel view that emotions occupy a high-dimensional space of categories bridged by smooth gradients of meaning. They offer an approximation of a taxonomy of facial-bodily expressions, visualized within an online interactive map. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Children's perception of emotions in the context of live interactions: Eye movements and emotion judgements

Research examining children's understanding of emotional expressions has generally used static, isolated facial expressions presented in a non-interactive context. However, these tasks do not resemble children's experiences with expressions in daily life, where they must attend to a range of information, including others' facial expressions, movements, and the situation surrounding the expression. In this research, we examine the development of visual attention to another's emotional expressions during a live interaction. Via an eye-tracker, children (4-11 years old) and adults viewed an experimenter open a series of opaque boxes and make an expression (happiness, sadness, fear, or disgust) based on the object inside. Participants determined which of four possible objects (stickers, a broken toy, a spider, or dog poop) was in the box. We examined the proportion of the trial in which participants looked to three areas of the face (the eyes, mouth, and nose area), and the available contextual information (the box held by the experimenter, the four objects). Although children spent less time looking to the face than adults did, their pattern of visual attention within the face and to object AOIs did not differ from that of adults. Finally, for adults, increased accuracy was linked to spending less time looking to the objects whereas increased accuracy for children was not strongly linked to any emotion cue. These data indicate that although children spend less time looking to the face during live interactions than adults do, the proportion of time spent looking to areas of the face and context are generally adult-like.

Family expressiveness relates to happy emotion matching among 9-month-old infants

Perceiving and understanding the emotions of those around us is an imperative skill to develop early in life. An infant's family environment provides most of their emotional exemplars in early development. However, the relation between the early development of emotion perception and family expressiveness remains understudied. To investigate this potential link to early emotion perception development, we examined 38 infants at 9 months of age. We assessed infants' ability to match emotions across facial and vocal modalities using an intermodal matching paradigm for angry-neutral, happy-neutral, and sad-neutral pairings. We also attained family expressiveness information via parent report. Our results indicate a significant positive relation between emotion matching and family expressiveness specific to the happy-neutral condition. However, we found no evidence for emotion matching for the infants as a group in any of the three conditions. These results suggest that family expressiveness does relate to emotion matching for the earliest developing emotional category among 9-month-old infants and that emotion matching with multiple emotions at this age is a challenging task.