Infants' attention is biased by emotional expressions and eye gaze direction

Autor(en)

Stefanie Hoehl, Letizia Palumbo, Christine Heinisch, Tricia Striano

Abstrakt

This study investigates infants' processing of emotional expressions in combination with referential eye gaze cues. In experiment 1, 7-month-old infants' neural responses to fearful and neutral faces, which were looking at a novel object, were assessed. Infants' attention, as indexed by the negative central component of the event-related potential, was enhanced when the adult gazed at the object with a fearful expression compared with a neutral expression. In experiment 2, no effect of emotion on amplitude of the negative central was found when the face directed eye gaze at the infant and away from the object. We conclude that by 7 months, infants use emotional expressions in triadic person-object-person contexts to detect threat in the environment.

Organisation(en)

Externe Organisation(en)

Max-Planck-Institut für Kognitions- und Neurowissenschaften, Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza, Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB), City University of New York

Journal

NEUROREPORT

Band

19

Seiten

579-582

Anzahl der Seiten

4

ISSN

0959-4965

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1097/WNR.0b013e3282f97897

Publikationsdatum

2008

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

501005 Entwicklungspsychologie

Schlagwörter

Link zum Portal

https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/de/publications/infants-attention-is-biased-by-emotional-expressions-and-eye-gaze-direction(94aa252a-9bf3-4fb5-bc1d-502a24b9a7f7).html