Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University.
Dev Psychol. 2017 Oct;53(10):1826-1832. doi: 10.1037/dev0000381. Epub 2017 Jul 31.
For decades, scholars have examined how children first recognize emotional facial expressions. This research has found that infants younger than 10 months can discriminate negative, within-valence facial expressions in looking time tasks, and children older than 24 months struggle to categorize these expressions in labeling and free-sort tasks. Specifically, these older children, and even adults, consistently misidentify disgust expressions as anger. Although some scholars have hypothesized that young infants would also be unable to categorize anger and disgust expressions, this question has not been empirically tested. In addition, very little research has examined developmental changes in infants' perceptual categorization abilities with high arousal, within-valence emotions. For this reason, the current study tested 10- and 18-month-olds in a looking time task and found that both age groups could perceptually categorize anger and disgust facial expressions. Furthermore, 18-month-olds showed a heightened sensitivity to novel anger expressions, suggesting that, over the second year of life, infants' emotion categorization skills undergo developmental change. These findings are the first to demonstrate that young infants can categorize anger and disgust facial expressions and to document how this skill develops and changes over time. (PsycINFO Database Record
几十年来，学者们一直在研究儿童最初如何识别情绪面部表情。这项研究发现，10 个月以下的婴儿在注视时间任务中可以区分负性、同效面部表情，而 24 个月以上的儿童在标签和自由分类任务中难以对这些表情进行分类。具体来说，这些年龄较大的儿童，甚至成年人，总是将厌恶表情误认为愤怒。尽管一些学者假设婴儿也无法对愤怒和厌恶表情进行分类，但这个问题尚未经过实证检验。此外，很少有研究用高唤醒、同效情绪来检验婴儿在知觉分类能力上的发展变化。出于这个原因，本研究在注视时间任务中测试了 10 个月和 18 个月大的婴儿，发现这两个年龄组都可以在知觉上对愤怒和厌恶的面部表情进行分类。此外，18 个月大的婴儿对新奇的愤怒表情表现出更高的敏感性，这表明，在生命的第二年，婴儿的情绪分类技能会发生发展变化。这些发现首次证明，婴儿可以对愤怒和厌恶的面部表情进行分类，并记录了这一技能是如何随着时间的推移而发展和变化的。
