Department of Psychology, UBinding Actions and Emotions in the Infantniversity of Milan-Bicocca , Milano, Italy.
NeuroMi, Milan Center for Neuroscience , Milano, Italy.
Soc Neurosci. 2020 Aug;15(4):470-476. doi: 10.1080/17470919.2020.1760130. Epub 2020 May 5.
The first year represents an exceptional time of development during which important social skills emerge, like action and emotion understanding. However, to date, no study explored the neural underpinnings of infants' ability to bind emotion- to action-related information. To assess this issue, we measured EEG activity while 6-month-old infants observed the same action performed by an actress displaying three different emotional expressions (happiness, anger and neutral). Results have shown that actions embedded in an emotional context (happiness and anger) elicited larger early negativity at parieto-occipital sites compared to a neutral context. This finding suggests that already at 6 months of age, infants use information coming from facial expressions to detect the saliency and relevance of others' actions.
第一年是发展的特殊时期，在此期间重要的社交技能会出现，比如动作和情绪理解。然而，迄今为止，还没有研究探索婴儿将情绪与动作相关信息结合的能力的神经基础。为了评估这个问题，我们在 6 个月大的婴儿观察女演员表现出三种不同情绪（快乐、愤怒和中性）的相同动作时测量了脑电图活动。结果表明，在情绪背景（快乐和愤怒）中嵌入的动作比在中性背景中引起更大的顶枕部早期负性。这一发现表明，婴儿在 6 个月大时就已经使用来自面部表情的信息来检测他人动作的显著性和相关性。
