The ability of babies to
differentiate emotional expressions appears to develop during their first six
months. But do they really recognize emotion or do they only distinguish the
physical characteristics of faces and voices? Researchers have just provided an
initial answer to this question, measuring the ability of six-month-old babies
to make a connection between a voice expressing happiness or anger and the
emotional expression on a face.
6-month-old infants could
transfer amodal information from emotional voices to emotional faces. Thus,
sequences of successive emotional stimuli (voice or face from
one sensory modality -auditory- to another sensory modality -visual-),
corresponding to a cross-modal transfer, were displayed to 24 infants. Each
sequence presented an emotional (angry or happy) or neutral voice, uniquely,
followed by the simultaneous presentation of two static emotional faces (angry
or happy, congruous or incongruous with the emotional voice). Eye movements in
response to the visual stimuli were recorded with an eye-tracker. First,
results suggested no difference in infants’ looking time to happy or angry face
after listening to the neutral voice or the angry voice. Nevertheless, after
listening to the happy voice, infants looked longer at the incongruent angry
face (the mouth area in particular) than the congruent happy face. These
results revealed that a cross-modal transfer (from auditory to visual
modalities) is possible for 6-month-old infants only after the presentation of
a happy voice, suggesting that they recognize this emotion amodally.
The results of the study revealed that six-month-olds did not
have a preference for either of the emotional faces if they had already heard a
neutral voice or a voice expressing anger. On the other hand, they spent longer
looking at the face expressing anger - especially its mouth - after hearing a
voice expressing happiness. This visual preference for novelty on the part of
six-month-olds testifies of their early ability to transfer emotional
information about happiness from the auditory to the visual mode.
Ref: Amaya Palama, Jennifer Malsert, Edouard Gentaz. Are 6-month-old human infants able to transfer emotional information (happy or angry) from voices to faces? An eye-tracking study. PLOS ONE, 2018; 13 (4): e0194579 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0194579
