Abstract
A myriad of emotion perception studies has shown infants’ ability to discriminate different emotional categories, yet there has been little investigation of infants’ perception of cultural differences in emotions. Hence little is known about the extent to which culture-specific emotion information is recognised in the beginning of life. Caucasian Australian infants of 10–12 months participated in a visual-paired comparison task where their preferential looking patterns to three types of infant-directed emotions (anger, happiness, surprise) from two different cultures (Australian, Japanese) were examined. Differences in racial appearances were controlled. Infants exhibited preferential looking to Japanese over Caucasian Australian mothers’ angry and surprised expressions, whereas no difference was observed in trials involving East-Asian Australian mothers. In addition, infants preferred Caucasian Australian mothers’ happy expressions. These findings suggest that 11-month-olds are sensitive to cultural differences in spontaneous infant-directed emotional expressions when they are combined with a difference in racial appearance.
Highlights
Understanding emotion signalling with facial expressions is a critical ability as it plays a crucial role in successful human social communication, interpersonal relationships and even survival [1,2,3,4,5,6]
The current study examines first-year infants’ sensitivity to racial and cultural information embedded in infant-directed facial expressions
Distinct patterns for each emotion emerge from the current findings: First, in trials with Caucasian Australian mothers, infants looked less at the Caucasian mothers when paired with Japanese mothers than when paired with East-Asian Australian mothers, and preferred the happy expressions over the angry expression
Summary
Understanding emotion signalling with facial expressions is a critical ability as it plays a crucial role in successful human social communication, interpersonal relationships and even survival [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Our ability to detect and differentiate facial expressions of emotion has evolutionary benefits in knowing when and how to best respond to displays of aggression or danger [1, 7]. This is especially relevant for infants who have limited resources to derive mental states and expectations of others in their ambient environment. Universality hypotheses predict that infants should innately recognise the basic universal categories linked to facial expressions [11].
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