Emotion Processing in Infancy

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of behavioral and neurophysiological research on the discrimination and categorization of emotional expressions in the first year of life. Three recent lines of research with theoretical implications beyond perceptual discrimination of facial expressions are discussed. The first focuses on the development of attentional biases towards facial expressions. Between 5 and 7 months of age infants start to attend preferentially towards fearful faces rather than happy faces and disengage attention less easily from fearful faces than from happy or neutral faces. Recent studies have shown that there are individual differences between infants regarding these biases, which may potentially be informative with respect to later emotion regulation abilities or affective dysfunctions. Studies within the second line of research have shown that infants process emotional facial expressions differently depending on the referent of the expression. For instance, 7-month-olds respond with increased attention to a fearful face that looks towards an object than a fearful face without a clear referent. In contrast, an angry face with eyes gazing straight ahead receives more attention by infants of the same age than an angry face looking to the side. This research and its implications on the development of social referencing and observational fear learning will also be discussed. In the third line of research, eye tracking is used to examine infants' looking patterns at faces with different emotional expressions. I will conclude with open questions and future directions for the field.