Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London, London, United Kingdom; Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Department of Psychology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway.
Infant Behav Dev. 2022 Aug;68:101751. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2022.101751. Epub 2022 Jul 29.
Actions can convey information about the affective state of an actor. By the end of the first year, infants show sensitivity to such emotional information in actions. Here, we examined the mechanisms contributing to infants' developing sensitivity to emotional action kinematics. We hypothesized that this sensitivity might rely on two factors: a stable motor representation of the observed action to be able to detect deviations from how it would typically be performed and experience with emotional expressions. The sensitivity of 12- to 13-month-old infants to happy and angry emotional cues in a manual transport action was examined using facial EMG. Infants' own movements when performing an object transport task were assessed using optical motion capture. The infants' caregivers' emotional expressivity was measured using a questionnaire. Negative emotional expressivity of the primary caregiver was significantly related to infants' sensitivity to observed angry actions. There was no evidence for such an association with infants' own motor skill. Overall, our results show that infants' experience with emotions, measured as caregivers' emotional expressivity, may aid infants' discrimination of others' emotions expressed in action kinematics.
动作可以传达行为者的情感状态信息。在第一年结束时，婴儿就表现出对这种动作中的情感信息的敏感性。在这里，我们研究了导致婴儿对情感动作运动学发展敏感性的机制。我们假设这种敏感性可能依赖于两个因素：对所观察到的动作的稳定的运动表现，以便能够检测到其与通常表现方式的偏差，以及对情感表达的经验。使用面部 EMG 检查了 12 至 13 个月大的婴儿对手动运输动作中快乐和愤怒情绪线索的敏感性。使用光学运动捕捉来评估婴儿在执行物体运输任务时自己的动作。通过问卷来衡量婴儿主要照顾者的情绪表达能力。主要照顾者的负面情绪表达能力与婴儿对观察到的愤怒动作的敏感性显著相关。但是，没有证据表明与婴儿自己的运动技能有关。总的来说，我们的研究结果表明，婴儿对情绪的体验，表现为照顾者的情绪表达能力，可能有助于婴儿对他人在动作运动学中表达的情绪的辨别。
