Rutgers University, Newark, USA.
University of California, Los Angeles, USA.
Infant Behav Dev. 2022 Aug;68:101743. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2022.101743. Epub 2022 Jun 25.
Language has been proposed as a potential mechanism for young children's developing understanding of emotion. However, much remains unknown about this relation at an individual difference level. The present study investigated 15- to 18-month-old infants' perception of emotions across multiple pairs of faces. Parents reported their child's productive vocabulary, and infants participated in a non-linguistic emotion perception task via an eye tracker. Infant vocabulary did not predict nonverbal emotion perception when accounting for infant age, gender, and general object perception ability (β = -0.15, p = .300). However, we observed a gender difference: Only girls' vocabulary scores related to nonverbal emotion perception when controlling for age and general object perception ability (β = 0.42, p = .024). Further, boys showed a stronger preference for the novel emotion face vs. girls (t(48) = 2.35, p = .023, d= 0.67). These data suggest that pathways of processing emotional information (e.g., using language vs visual information) may differ for girls and boys in late infancy.
语言被认为是儿童发展情绪理解能力的潜在机制。然而，在个体差异层面上，这种关系仍有许多未知之处。本研究调查了 15 至 18 个月大的婴儿对多对人脸的情绪感知。父母报告了他们孩子的产出词汇量，婴儿通过眼动追踪器参与了非语言情绪感知任务。当考虑到婴儿年龄、性别和一般物体感知能力时，婴儿词汇量与非语言情绪感知之间没有相关性（β=-0.15，p=0.300）。然而，我们观察到了一种性别差异：只有女孩的词汇得分与控制年龄和一般物体感知能力后的非语言情绪感知有关（β=0.42，p=0.024）。此外，男孩对新奇情绪面孔的偏好强于女孩（t(48)=2.35，p=0.023，d=0.67）。这些数据表明，在婴儿晚期，女孩和男孩处理情绪信息的途径（例如，使用语言与视觉信息）可能不同。
