Bimodal Dynamics of Faces and Voices Influence Older Infants' Perception of Emotion

Given the importance of infants' perception of bimodal speech for emerging language and emotion development, this study used eye‐tracking technology to examine infants' attention to face+voice displays differing by emotion (fear, sad, happy) and visual stimulus (dynamic versus static). Peripheral distracters were presented to measure attention disengagement. It was predicted that infants would look longer at and disengage more slowly from dynamic bimodal emotion displays, especially when viewing dynamic fear. However, the results from twenty‐two 10‐month‐olds found significantly greater attention on dynamic versus static trials, independent of emotion. Interestingly, infants looked equally to mouth and eye regions of speakers' faces except when viewing/hearing dynamic fear; in this case, they fixated more on the speakers' mouth region. Average latencies to distracters were longer on dynamic compared to static bimodal stimuli, but not differentiated by emotion. Thus, infants' attention was enhanced (in terms of both elicitation and maintenance) by dynamic, bimodal emotion displays. Results are compared to conflicting findings using static emotion displays, with suggestions for future research using more ecologically relevant dynamic, multimodal displays to gain a richer understanding of infants' processing of emotion.     

12‐Month‐Old Infants' Perception of Attention Direction in Static Video Images

Twelve‐month‐old infants' ability to perceive gaze direction in static video images was investigated. The images showed a woman who performed attention‐directing actions by looking or pointing toward 1 of 4 objects positioned in front of her (2 on each side). When the model just pointed at the objects, she looked straight ahead, and when she just looked, her hands were hidden below the tabletop. An eye movement system (TOBII) was used to register the gaze of the participants. We found that the infants clearly discriminated the gaze directions to the objects. There was no tendency to mix up the 2 object positions, located 10° apart, on the same side of the model. The infants spent more time looking at the attended objects than the unattended ones and they shifted gaze more often from the face of the model to the attended object than to the unattended objects. Pointing did not significantly increase the infants' tendency to move gaze to the attended object, irrespective of whether the pointing gesture was accompanied by looking or not. In all conditions the infants spent most of the time looking at the model's face. This tendency was especially noticeable in the pointing‐only condition and the condition where the model just looked straight ahead.     

Follow My Gaze: Face Race and Sex Influence Gaze‐Cued Attention in Infancy

Using the eye gaze of others to direct one's own attention develops during the first year of life and is thought to be an important skill for learning and social communication. However, it is currently unclear whether infants differentially attend to and encode objects cued by the eye gaze of individuals within familiar groups (e.g., own race, more familiar sex) relative to unfamiliar groups (e.g., other race, less familiar sex). During gaze cueing, but prior to the presentation of objects, 10‐month‐olds looked longer to the eyes of own‐race faces relative to 5‐month‐olds and relative to the eyes of other‐race faces. After gaze cueing, two objects were presented alongside the face and at both ages, infants looked longer to the uncued objects for faces from the more familiar‐sex and longer to cued objects for the less familiar‐sex faces. Finally, during the test phase, both 5‐ and 10‐month‐old infants looked longer to uncued objects relative to cued objects but only when the objects were cued by an own‐race and familiar‐sex individual. Results demonstrate that infants use face eye gaze differently when the cue comes from someone within a highly experienced group.     

The effect of masks on the visual preference for faces in the first year of life

To prevent the spread of COVID-19, face masks were mandatory in many public spaces around the world. Since faces are the gateway to early social cognition, this raised major concerns about the effect face masks may have on infants' attention to faces as well as on their language and social development. The goal of the present study was to assess how face masks modulate infants' attention to faces over the course of the first year of life. We measured 3, 6, 9, and 12-month-olds’ looking behavior using a paired visual preference paradigm under two experimental conditions. First, we tested infants' preference for upright masked or unmasked faces of the same female individual. We found that regardless of age, infants looked equally long at the masked and unmasked faces. Second, we compared infants' attention to an upright masked versus an inverted masked face. Three- and 6-month-olds looked equally long to the masked faces when they were upright or inverted. However, 9- and 12-month-old infants showed a novelty preference for the inverted masked face. Our findings suggest that more experience with faces, including masked faces, leads to efficient adaptations of infants' visual system for processing impoverished social stimuli, such as partially occluded faces.     

Newborn Infants' Preference for Attractive Faces: The Role of Internal and External Facial Features

Several previous experiments have found that newborn and young infants will spend more time looking at attractive faces when these are shown paired with faces judged by adults to be unattractive. Two experimental conditions are described with the aim of finding whether the “attractiveness effect” results from attention to internal or external facial features, or both. Pairs of attractive and less attractive faces (as judged by adults) were shown to newborn infants (mean age 2 days, 9 hours), where each pair had either identical internal features (and different external features) or identical external features (and different internal features). In the latter, but not the former, condition the infants looked longer at the attractive faces. These findings are clear evidence that newborn infants use information about internal facial features in making preferences based on attractiveness. It is suggested that when newborn (and older) infants are presented with facial stimuli, whether dynamic or static, they are able to attend both to internal and external facial features.     

Faces Attract Infants' Attention in Complex Displays

Infant's face preferences have previously been assessed in displays containing 1 or 2 faces. Here we present 6‐month‐old infants with a complex visual array containing faces among multiple visual objects. Despite the competing objects, infants direct their first saccade toward faces more frequently than expected by chance (Experiment 1). The attention‐grabbing effect of faces is not selective to upright faces (Experiment 2) but does require the presence of internal facial elements, as faces whose interior has been phase‐scrambled did not attract infants' attention (Experiment 3). On the contrary, when the number of fixations is considered, upright faces are scanned more extensively than both inverted and phase‐scrambled faces. The difference in selectivity between the first look measure and the fixation count measure is discussed in light of a distinction between attention‐grabbing and attention‐holding mechanisms.     

Aging and the Effects of Facial and Prosodic Cues on Emotional Intensity Ratings and Memory Reconstructions

Young (M = 23 years) and older (M = 77 years) adults' interpretation and memory for the emotional content of spoken discourse was examined in an experiment using short, videotaped scenes of two young actresses talking to each other about emotionally-laden events. Emotional nonverbal information (prosody or facial expressions) was conveyed at the end of each scene at low, medium, and high intensities. Nonverbal information indicating anger, happiness, or fear, conflicted with the verbal information. Older adults' ability to differentiate levels of emotional intensity was not as strong (for happiness and anger) compared to younger adults. An incidental memory task revealed that older adults, more often than younger adults, reconstruct what people state verbally to coincide with the meaning of the nonverbal content, if the nonverbal content is conveyed through facial expressions. A second experiment with older participants showed that the high level of memory reconstructions favoring the nonverbal interpretation was maintained when the ages of the participants and actresses were matched, and when the nonverbal content was conveyed both through prosody and facial expressions.     

The Use of Body Movements and Gestures as Cues to Emotions in Younger and Older Adults

Eighty-two younger and older adults participated in a two-part study of the decoding of emotion through body movements and gestures. In the first part, younger and older adults identified emotions depicted in brief videotaped displays of young adult actors portraying emotional situations. In each display, the actors were silent and their faces were electronically blurred in order to isolate the body cues to emotion. Although both groups made accurate emotion identifications well above chance levels, older adults made more overall errors, and this was especially true for negative emotions. Moreover, their errors were more likely to reflect the misidentification of emotional displays as neutral in content. In the second part, younger and older adults rated the videotaped displays using scales reflecting several movement dimensions (e.g., form, tempo, force, and movement). The ratings of both age groups were in high agreement and provided reliable information about particular body cues to emotion. The errors made by older adults were linked to reactions to exaggerated or ambiguous body cues.     

Looking Behavior and Smiling in Down Syndrome Infants

We studied the relation between direction of gaze and smiling in 15 typically developing infants and 15 infants with Down syndrome. All of them were videotaped during face-to-face interaction with their mothers at home, and while having access to their familiar toys. Results showed that mothers in the two groups behaved in a similar way; that Down syndrome infants looked at their mother's face for longer than typically developing children; and that the relationship between looking and smiling was similar in the two cases and reflected as an increase in the time the infant looked at its mother's face and a decrease in the time the infant looked at toys. It was deduced that Down syndrome infants are capable of distinguishing the differential significance of faces and toys, so that, in the same way as typically developing infants, they direct their affective behavior fundamentally towards the social element, which leads us to consider the affiliative function implied by this expression.     

Development of personal space among Puerto Ricans

Puerto Rican children at the first-, sixth-, and eleventh-grade levels were observed interacting in same-sex dyads in two different cultural environments, New York and Puerto Rico. In accord with results obtained with other cultural groups, older children used larger interaction distances than did younger children. This development occurred later, however, for Puerto Rican children than had been reported for Americans of northern European ancestry. Further, Puerto Rican children and adolescents did not display the consistently reported sex differences in personal space preferences. Females did stand more directly with one another (face-to-face) though, and older children of both sexes interacted at more direct orientations than younger children. The results are discussed in the context of cultural differences in socialization practices.     

Attachment and joint attention in infants: The role of expectation

Previous research highlighted the correlation between parent–infant's attachment quality and joint attention skills. However, the underlying mechanisms of this relationship are still unclear. The aim of this study was to assess whether it is by mediating the expectation component in Internal Working Models that the quality of attachment style can affect joint attention. At first, 12- to 20-month-old infants were classified into secure and insecure groups using the Strange Situation Procedure. On a following day, using a violation-of-expectation paradigm, infants were habituated to two joint attention videos. Finally, the mean looking time duration of secure and insecure infants were compared with each other between two “divergent attention” and “joint attention” videos. Infants looked longer for divergent attention videos suggesting they did have expectation regarding the appropriate response in triadic interactions. In line with our main hypothesis, secure infants, but not insecure ones, looked longer in the divergent attention situation when an attachment-related context was present, revealing the possible mediating role of “expectations” in the correlation between attachment and joint attention.     

Multiple Measures of Fixation on Social Content in Infancy: Evidence for a Single Social Cognitive Construct?

The preference of infants to fixate on social information in a stimulus is well known. We examine how this preference manifests across a series of free‐viewing tasks using different stimulus types. Participants were thirty typically developing infants. We measured eye movements when viewing isolated faces, faces alongside objects in a grid, and faces naturally presented in photographed scenes. In each task, infants fixated social content for longer than nonsocial content. Social preference scores representing distribution of fixation to social versus general image content were highly correlated and thus combined into a single composite measure, which was independent of demographic and behavioral measures. We infer that multiple eye‐tracking tasks can be used to generate a composite measure of social preference in infancy. This approach may prove useful in the early characterization of developmental disabilities.     

Mothers' Verbal and Nonverbal Strategies in Relation to Infants' Object‐Directed Actions in Real Time and Across the First Three Years in Ethnically Diverse Families

We examined maternal behavioral strategies in relation to infants' object‐directed actions in real time and over developmental time in 206 mother–infant dyads from African American, Dominican immigrant, and Mexican immigrant backgrounds. Mothers were asked to share a set of beads and strings with their infants when children were 14, 24, and 36 months. We coded three types of maternal strategies—eliciting attention, instructive assistance, and encouragement—which could be expressed verbally (e.g., “look”, “turn it”, “good job!”) or physically (i.e., through gestures, hands‐on guidance, or transfer of objects). We also coded infants' unassisted bead‐stringing. Across ethnic groups and ages, mothers' hands‐on guidance and object transfer increased the likelihood that infants would follow with unassisted bead‐stringing during real‐time interaction. Over developmental time, mothers modified their strategies: They displayed fewer attention‐getting strategies and more encouragement across infant ages, and peaked in their provision of instructive assistance when infants were 24 months. Additionally, Mexican mothers displayed more nonverbal strategies (e.g., gestures, hands‐on guidance) than did African American and/or Dominican mothers, who displayed more verbal strategies (e.g., attention‐getting and encouraging language). Developmental and real‐time patterns in mother–infant object‐related interactions generalize across ethnicities, although mothers' emphases on specific strategies are culture specific.     

Television News and Political Socialization

Elementary school children frequently watch child-oriented newssegments on Saturday morning television, and occasionally viewnetwork newscasts. News viewing is mildly associated with bothpolitical knowledge and public affairs interest for older children,but younger viewers learn little. Parent-child discussion ofnews is also related to newscast exposure.     

The Painful Truth: Interpretation of Facial Expressions of Pain in Older Adults

The purpose of this study was to determine whether it is more difficult to decode facial expressions of pain in older than in younger adults. The facial expressions of 10 younger and 10 older chronic pain patients undergoing a painful diagnostic test were viewed on videotape by untrained judges. Judges estimated the severity of pain being experienced by the patients. Ratings made of the older faces during painful moments described more pain, and appeared more accurate, than those made of younger faces. Judges also reported seeing more pain in posed, masked, and baseline facial expressions in the older adults. Age-related structural changes to the face were not responsible for this bias. This suggests that judges were predisposed to see pain in the faces of the older patients, and undermines the assumption that their ratings of pain in the painful moment segments were accurate.     

Exploring Parents' Experiences and Reactions to Adolescents' Hyperactivity,Impulsivity, and Attention Problems

Adolescents' hyperactivity, impulsivity, and attention problems (HIA) have been shown to make parents feel powerless. In this study, the authors examined whether these feelings were dependent on parents' experiences with their older children. Two models that offer different predictions of how parents make use of their earlier experiences when raising their later‐born children were explored: the learning‐from‐experience model and the spillover model. The authors used reports from 372 parents with 1 child (M_age = 11.92) and 198 parents with 2 children (M_age = 11.89 and 14.35) from a small town in a European country. The results did not support a learning‐from‐experience process. Instead, consistent with a spillover process, parents felt particularly powerless about their younger children with HIA if they also felt powerless about their older children. This study suggests that parents' experiences of raising their older children are important for their reactions to HIA in their younger children     

The saving and spending habits of young people

Over 250 British children and adolescents completed a questionnaire on their sources of personal income (pocket money/allowance, part-time job, gifts), as well as how much they had saved, where it was stored, and for what purpose it was intended. Particular attention was paid to bank accounts. The participants also responded to various attitude statements about money and the economic situation in general. Results showed numerous sex and age, but few class differences. Males received more pocket money and presents than females, and older children more than younger children. Over 80% of the children claimed their parents would not give them extra money if they had spent it all. Regressional analyses showed that the best predictors of regularity of saving, as well as the proportion of money saved, were the more money received; the less money spent in the previous week and total amount of money saved in the previous week. The results are discussed in terms of the limited empirical literature on children's pocket money allowances, particularly with respect to demographic differences. Limitations of the methodology are also reported.     

Taking risks when communicating on the Internet: the role of offline social-psychological factors in young people's vulnerability to online risks

Children and young people encounter a range of risks on the internet relating to communication. Making friends online has attracted particular attention as a risky behaviour, especially when this leads to offline meetings, as has giving out personal information online. This article, based on the 'UK Children Go Online' survey, seeks to explain the online communication of 9-19-year-olds in terms of their offline socio-psychological characteristics (shyness, life satisfaction, risk-taking), family communication patterns and online behaviour/skills. Findings show that older teens engage in more online communication activities than do younger children and so encounter more communication risks. Although girls communicate more on the internet, this seems not to put them more at risk. It was found that children's offline social psychological characteristics, particularly their levels of life satisfaction and risk-taking, influence their online communication, with different online communication activities being predicted by different patterns of off- and online characteristics. There are weak indications that, in families which have a more conversational style of communication, teens may take fewer risks online, including a lower likelihood of meeting online friends offline. Multiple regression analyses show that those children and teens who are less satisfied with their lives and who have become more frequent and skilled internet users are more likely to value the internet as a communicative environment in which they feel more confident than they do offline, particularly in relation to the potential for anonymous communication. Since this in turn leads some into risky activities, the implications for research and policy are discussed.     

No right time: the significance of reproductive timing for younger and older mothers' moralities

Drawing on a small qualitative study of younger and older mothers, this article argues that the timing of motherhood is significant for the construction of classed maternal moralities. It is based on qualitative data generated during a year of fieldwork, with a group of mothers who had their first child when particularly younger or older than average. My discussion of mothers' accounts highlights the multitude of different ‘right’ times mothers evoked and their struggles to reconcile them. In particular I identify there were two normative and conflicting discourses about the ‘right’ time for motherhood the narrative of appropriately timed motherhood and the discourse of generational right time. This article highlights the classed dimensions of normative discourses about the timing of motherhood and draws attention to the lifecourse dis‐synchronicities which these two groups of women faced around becoming a mother, especially the older group for whom this had important intergenerational consequences.