Investigating the influence of natural social information on infants’ development of emotion understanding

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Project Summary/Abstract The ability to perceive and categorize emotion information early in life is crucial for healthy social cognitive development. Prior research has attempted to identify how infants and young children learn about others’ emotions by examining whether those children can differentiate or label exaggerated, stereotypical facial configurations. However, in real life, emotions are expressed with substantially more variability than what is depicted in these stereotyped configurations. Thus, the actual dynamic input that infants are exposed to as they are forming emotion categories is still unknown. To accurately identify how infants and young children develop emotion categories, it is imperative to first, understand what emotion information (e.g., facial configurations, emotion labels) infants are exposed to in their natural environments, and to second, identify how this natural input relates to infant emotion perception and categorization. The current proposal will address this gap in the literature with two aims. Specifically, Aim 1 will characterize infants’ exposure to social information in their natural environment. Building on this information, Aim 2 will examine the relation between infants’ exposure to natural social information and their emotion perception. Aim 1 will be addressed using an existing corpus of video and audio data. When infants from the corpus are 6, 10, and 14 months of age, videos will be FACS coded to identify what facial configurations are common in infants’ field of view, and audio will be coded for use of emotion labels. For Aim 2, a new group of infants will be recruited to visit the lab longitudinally at the same three time points (6, 10, and 14 months) as those coded in the corpus. Mothers and infants will be recorded as they interact, and these recordings will later be coded for the same emotion information from Aim 1. Then, the infants will take part in an emotion perception task in which highly stereotyped and natural facial configurations will be presented in a categorical oddball paradigm as infant eye movements and ERPs are recorded. This study will explore how natural emotion information from the infants’ mother relates to infant responses to the emotion perception task over time. To accomplish these aims, it is imperative that the applicant gains methodological expertise in behavioral coding (FACS) and ERPs, which will allow her to accurately characterize natural social information, and to determine what emotion information infants implicitly expect to belong within emotion categories. Ultimately, results from this proposal will inform theories of emotional development and may be used to create more targeted interventions for early problems with emotion processing. These aims will be completed under the mentorship of Drs. Vanessa LoBue, Lisa Feldman-Barrett, and Lisa Oakes, who collectively have interdisciplinary expertise in a variety of methodologies and theoretical orientations. The proposed training goals, which focus on building a stronger theoretical and methodological foundation in emotional development, will expand the applicant’s skill set and better prepare her for a successful, independent research career that moves the field of emotional development forward.