Abstract
Efficient processing of gaze direction and facial expression of emotion is crucial for early social and emotional development. Toward the end of the first year of life infants begin to pay more attention to negative expressions, but it remains unclear to what extent emotion expression is processed jointly with gaze direction at this age. This study sought to establish the interactions of gaze direction and emotion expression in visual orienting in 9- to 12-month-olds. In particular, we tested whether these interactions can be explained by the negativity bias hypothesis and the shared signal hypothesis. We measured saccadic latencies in response to peripheral targets in a gaze-cueing paradigm with happy, angry, and fearful female faces. In the Pilot Experiment three gaze directions were used (direct, congruent with target location, incongruent with target location). In the Main Experiment we sought to replicate the results of the Pilot experiment using a simpler design without the direct gaze condition. In both experiments we found a robust gaze-cueing effect for happy faces, i.e., facilitation of orienting toward the target in the gaze-cued location, compared with the gaze-incongruent location. We found more rapid orienting to targets cued by happy relative to angry and fearful faces. We did not find any gaze-cueing effect for angry or fearful faces. These results are not consistent with the shared signal hypothesis. While our results show differential processing of positive and negative emotions, they do not support a general negativity bias. On the contrary, they indicate that toward the age of 12 months infants show a positivity bias in gaze-cueing tasks.
Highlights
A number of studies have demonstrated infants’ sensitivity to salient social cues, such as gaze direction and facial expressions of emotion from the first months of life
Saccadic reaction times (SRTs) in the congruent gaze condition were significantly shorter than in the incongruent condition [M = 334.15 ms vs. M = 439.19 ms, respectively; t(12) = −5.25, p = 0.001, BCa 95% CI (−148.61, −61.47)].Surprisingly, for the angry face there was a reverse pattern of results: latencies in the gaze-incongruent condition were significantly shorter than in the congruent one [M = 361.92 ms and M = 438.00 ms, respectively; t(12) = 2.50, p = 0.03, BCa 95% CI (9.65, 142.50)]
GENERAL DISCUSSION In our study we investigated the effects of emotion expression and gaze direction on overt orienting of 9- to 12-month-olds
Summary
A number of studies have demonstrated infants’ sensitivity to salient social cues, such as gaze direction and facial expressions of emotion from the first months of life (for a review see e.g., Frischen et al, 2007). Despite great progress of research in this area, only modest literature exists on the question of how infants integrate multiple dynamic and multimodal social cues into meaningful entities. In our study we aimed to examine the effects of facial emotion and gaze direction on visual orienting toward the end of the first year of life. In subsequent sections we first review research on the effects of gaze direction on infant attention, followed by work on similar effects of emotion expressions. We outline potential mechanisms that explain the interactions between perceived emotion and gaze
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