Abstract
Newborns and infants are highly depending on successfully communicating their needs; e.g., through crying and facial expressions. Although there is a growing interest in the mechanisms of and possible influences on the recognition of facial expressions in infants, heretofore there exists no validated database of emotional infant faces. In the present article we introduce a standardized and freely available face database containing Caucasian infant face images from 18 infants 4 to 12 months old. The development and validation of the Tromsø Infant Faces (TIF) database is presented in Study 1. Over 700 adults categorized the photographs by seven emotion categories (happy, sad, disgusted, angry, afraid, surprised, neutral) and rated intensity, clarity and their valance. In order to examine the relevance of TIF, we then present its first application in Study 2, investigating differences in emotion recognition across different stages of parenthood. We found a small gender effect in terms of women giving higher intensity and clarity ratings than men. Moreover, parents of young children rated the images as clearer than all the other groups, and parents rated “neutral” expressions as more clearly and more intense. Our results suggest that caretaking experience provides an implicit advantage in the processing of emotional expressions in infant faces, especially for the more difficult, ambiguous expressions.
Highlights
Successful social interaction depends on the ability to perceive and understand emotional expressions
In order to examine the relevance of Tromsø Infant Faces (TIF), we present its first application in Study 2, investigating differences in the emotion recognition accuracy, as well as in the clarity, intensity and valence ratings when comparing men and women at different stages of parenting
Infants show a variety of emotional expressions during 30 min of social interaction with a caregiver, we suggested some strategies to induce them
Summary
Successful social interaction depends on the ability to perceive and understand emotional expressions. Face processing is crucial in this regard, as faces carry valuable information about attentional focus, physical health and identity such as age, ethnicity and gender, as well as about emotions, pain and pleasure (Jack and Schyns, 2015). “reading a face” is often effortless and fast despite faces being rich on information and high-dimensional. This effortless processing of such complex information is due to predispositional, nearly immediate, learning about faces. For newborn babies and infants who are highly dependent on adult care, crying and facial expressions are the main means of communicating their physiological and Tromso Infant Faces (TIF) Database emotional states and needs (Sullivan, 2014). There is strong evidence suggesting that infant stimuli are prioritized in the attentional system of adults (Brosch et al, 2007; Parsons et al, 2011; Hahn et al, 2013; Borgi et al, 2014), especially if they display emotional content (Phelps et al, 2006; Brosch et al, 2007; Thompson-Booth et al, 2014a)
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