Psychological Sciences, University of California.
Department of Psychology, University of California.
Emotion. 2014 Jun;14(3):488-503. doi: 10.1037/a0035305. Epub 2014 Feb 10.
Appreciating authentic and inauthentic emotional communication is central to the formation of trusting and intimate interpersonal relationships. However, when infants are able to discriminate and respond to inauthentic emotion has not been investigated. The present set of studies was designed to investigate infant sensitivity to 3 specific cues of inauthenticity: the contextual congruency of the emotion, the degree of exaggeration of the emotion, and the clarity with which the emotion is communicated. In each experiment, 16- and 19-month-old infants were presented with an emotional communication in which an inauthentic cue was present or absent. Infant behavioral responding to the emotional context was observed and coded. In all 3 experiments, 19-month-old infants, but not 16-month-old infants, detected inauthentic emotional communication and differentially responded to the environment accordingly. These findings demonstrate that infants do not simply take all emotional communication at face value and are sensitive to features of emotional contexts beyond what is expressively communicated by the adult. Possible developmental mechanisms that may account for the observed developmental shift in infant emotional development are proposed, and implications for the present findings on future research in emotion and emotional development are highlighted.
欣赏真实和不真实的情感交流对于建立信任和亲密的人际关系至关重要。然而，婴儿何时能够辨别和对不真实的情感做出反应，这一点尚未得到研究。本系列研究旨在探讨婴儿对不真实性的 3 种特定线索的敏感性：情感的语境一致性、情感的夸张程度以及情感表达的清晰度。在每个实验中，16 个月和 19 个月大的婴儿都被呈现了一种带有或不带有不真实线索的情感交流。观察并记录了婴儿对情感环境的行为反应。在所有 3 个实验中，19 个月大的婴儿，而不是 16 个月大的婴儿，能够察觉到不真实的情感交流，并据此对环境做出不同的反应。这些发现表明，婴儿不会简单地全盘接受所有的情感交流，而是对情感环境的特征具有敏感性，超出了成年人表达的情感。本文提出了可能解释婴儿情感发展中观察到的发展转变的发展机制，并强调了这些发现对未来情感和情感发展研究的意义。
