Caron R F, Caron A J, Myers R S
Child Dev. 1985 Dec;56(6):1552-60.
To determine whether young infants discriminate photographs of different emotions on an affect-relevant basis or on the basis of isolated features unrelated to emotion, groups of 17-, 23-, and 29-week-olds were habituated to slides of 8 women posing either Toothy Angry, Nontoothy Angry, or Nontoothy Smiling facial expressions and were then shown 2 new women in the familiarized expression and in a novel Toothy Smiling expression. At all 3 ages, recovery to the novel Toothy Smiling faces occurred only after habituation to Nontoothy faces (whether smiling or angry), not after habituation to Toothy Angry faces, indicating that infants had been responsive to nonspecific features of the photographs (presence or absence of bared teeth) rather than to affectively relevant configurations of features. In a second experiment, 2 older age groups (35 and 41 weeks) also proved to be insensitive to affect-related aspects of still faces, though more so for angry than for happy expressions. It is suggested that the young infant's difficulty in extracting emotional information from static stimuli may be attributable to the absence of the critical invariants (dynamic, multimodally specified) that characterize naturalistic expressions of emotion.
为了确定婴儿是基于与情感相关的因素还是基于与情感无关的孤立特征来区分不同情绪的照片，研究人员将17周龄、23周龄和29周龄的婴儿分组，让他们观看8名女性摆出露齿愤怒、不露齿愤怒或不露齿微笑面部表情的幻灯片，然后向他们展示2名新女性，她们摆出的表情既有之前熟悉的表情，也有新的露齿微笑表情。在所有这三个年龄段，只有在婴儿习惯了不露齿的面部表情（无论是微笑还是愤怒）之后，才会对新的露齿微笑面孔表现出反应恢复，而在习惯了露齿愤怒面孔之后则不会，这表明婴儿对照片的非特定特征（有无露齿）有反应，而不是对与情感相关的特征组合有反应。在第二个实验中，两个较大年龄组（35周和41周）也被证明对静态面孔中与情感相关的方面不敏感，不过对愤怒表情的不敏感程度比对快乐表情的更高。研究表明，婴儿难以从静态刺激中提取情感信息，这可能归因于缺乏那些表征自然主义情感表达的关键不变量（动态的、多模态指定的）。
