Developmental relations between emotion input and emotion perception

理解和解释情绪表达对社会互动很重要。情绪理解有助于人们对他人的需求做出反应，对社会互动做出预测，甚至控制情绪反应。研究表明，更善于理解情绪的孩子被老师认为更擅长社交，更受同龄人喜爱，并且更能驾驭攻击性的互动。然而，婴儿和幼儿是如何学习他人的情绪的，人们还没有很好地理解，主要是因为婴儿和儿童在日常生活中看到的情绪还没有很好地理解。几十年来，研究人员一直认为，儿童是从他们在图片中看到的刻板的情感表达中学习的。最近的研究表明，与长期以来的假设相反，人们在现实生活中实际做出的情绪表达与刻板印象并不太像。这意味着我们仍然不了解婴儿使用什么输入来学习情感，以及这些输入如何影响他们的情感理解。因此，为了促进对情绪学习的理解，该项目记录了婴儿在日常社会互动中在现实世界中看到的情绪，以及他们如何将所看到的转化为他们对情绪的了解。通过描述典型发育婴儿的情感输入特征，本项目旨在为更好地理解非典型情感环境（如与抑郁、焦虑或虐待父母相关的情感环境）如何塑造情感行为的不适应轨迹铺平道路。项目调查人员计划在三个不同的时间点对婴儿进行测试，分别是6、9和12个月大。在每个时间点，研究人员在婴儿和他们的看护人身上放置一个头戴式摄像机，记录他们在日常互动中的情绪表达，比如玩耍、喂食和换尿布。这些视频数据首先用于(i)描述婴儿在6到12个月之间接触到的自然情感表达，以及（ii）描述照顾者如何回应婴儿自己提供的情感信息（如哭、笑等）。接下来，研究小组评估了看护者提供的情感信息（情绪化的面部表情和语言）是否能预测婴儿在几项测试婴儿对情绪了解程度的任务中的表现。这个项目的结果是为婴儿在日常社会互动中获得的自然情感信息如何帮助婴儿随着时间的推移学习情感提供见解。本研究为幼儿情绪知觉的早期发展提供了自然输入的新视角，为抽象情绪类别的发展研究奠定了基础。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Understanding and interpreting emotional expressions is important for social interactions. Emotion understanding helps people respond to others’ needs, make predictions about social interactions, and even control emotional responses. Research shows that children who are better at understanding emotions are perceived as more socially skilled by their teachers, more likable by their peers, and are better able to navigate aggressive interactions. However, it is not well understood how infants and young children learn about the emotions of others, mostly because the emotions that infants and children see in everyday life are not well understood. For decades, researchers have assumed that children learn from the stereotypic emotional expressions they see in pictures. Recent research suggests that in contrast to what was long assumed, the emotional expressions people actually make in real life do not look a lot like the stereotypes. This means that we still do not understand what input infants use to learn about emotions, and how that input informs their emotional understanding. Thus, in order to advance the understanding of emotional learning, this project documents the emotions infants see in the real world during everyday social interactions, and how what they see translates into what they know about emotions. By characterizing the emotional input common of typically developing infants, this project aims to pave the way to better understanding of how atypical emotional environments, such as those associated with depressed, anxious, or abusive parents, shape maladaptive trajectories of emotional behavior. Project investigators plan to test infants at three different time points, at 6, 9, and 12 months of age. At each time point, researchers place a head-mounted camera on both the infants and their caregivers to record their emotional expressions during everyday interactions such as playing, feeding, and diaper changing. These video data are first used to (i) describe infants’ exposure to naturalistic emotion expressions between the ages of 6 and 12 months, and (ii) describe how caregivers respond to the emotional information provided by the infants themselves (such as crying, laughing, etc.). Next, the research team assesses whether emotional information provided by caregivers (emotional facial expressions and language) predicts infants’ performance on several tasks that measure what infants know about emotions. The outcome of this project is to provide insight into how naturalistic emotional information available to infants during everyday social interactions helps shape how infants learn about emotions over time. This project provides new insights into the natural input for the early development of emotion perception in infancy and lays the groundwork for research on the development of abstract emotion categories.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.