Department of Psychology, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118, United States.
Department of Psychology, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118, United States; Tulane Brain Institute, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118, United States.
Infant Behav Dev. 2021 Aug;64:101626. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101626. Epub 2021 Aug 11.
Infants often experience interactions in which caregivers use dynamic messages to convey their affective and communicative intent. These dynamic emotional messages may shape the development of emotion discrimination skills and shared attention by influencing infants' attention to internal facial features and their responses to eye gaze cues. However, past research examining infants' responses to emotional faces has predominantly focused on classic, stereotyped expressions (e.g., happy, sad, angry) that may not reflect the variability that infants experience in their daily interactions. The present study therefore examined forty-two 6-month-old infants' attention to eyes vs. mouth and gaze cueing responses across multiple dynamic emotional messages that are common to infant-directed interactions. Overall, infants looked more to the eyes during messages with negative affect, but this increased attention to the eyes during these message conditions did not directly facilitate gaze cueing. Infants instead showed reliable gaze cueing only after messages with positive and neutral affect. We additionally observed gender differences in infants' attention to internal face features and subsequent gaze cueing responses. Female infants spent more time looking at the eyes during the dynamic emotional messages and showed increased initial orienting and longer looking to gaze-cued objects following positive messages, whereas male infants showed these gaze cueing effects following neutral messages. These results suggest that variability in caregivers' communication can shape infants' attention to and processing of emotion and gaze information.
婴儿经常会与照顾者互动，而照顾者会使用动态信息来传达他们的情感和交流意图。这些动态情感信息可能会通过影响婴儿对内部面部特征的注意力以及他们对目光注视线索的反应，来塑造情感辨别技能和共同注意力的发展。然而，过去研究婴儿对情绪面孔的反应的研究主要集中在经典的、刻板的表情（例如，快乐、悲伤、愤怒）上，而这些表情可能无法反映婴儿在日常互动中体验到的变化。因此，本研究考察了 42 名 6 个月大的婴儿对眼睛与嘴巴的注意力，以及对常见于婴儿导向互动的多种动态情感信息的目光注视线索反应。总的来说，婴儿在带有负面情绪的信息中更关注眼睛，但在这些信息条件下，对眼睛的这种额外关注并没有直接促进目光注视线索反应。只有在带有积极和中性情绪的信息之后，婴儿才会表现出可靠的目光注视线索反应。我们还观察到婴儿对内部面部特征的注意力和随后的目光注视线索反应存在性别差异。女婴在观看动态情感信息时，更多地注视眼睛，并且在观看积极信息后，对注视线索物体的初始定向和注视时间更长，而男婴在观看中性信息后才表现出这些目光注视线索反应。这些结果表明，照顾者沟通的变化可以塑造婴儿对情绪和目光信息的注意力和处理方式。
