How Emotional Body Expressions Direct an Infant\u27s First Look

Previous research in infant cognitive development has helped psychologists better understand visual looking patterns in infants exposed to various facial expressions and emotions. There has been significantly less research, however, on gaze sequences in relation to emotional body expressions. The aim of this study was to address this gap in the literature by using eye-tracking software to analyze infants’ gaze patterns of different areas of interest (AOIs) on emotional body expressions. Forty 6.5-month-old infants (Mean age in days = 193.9; SD = 8.00; 18 males) were shown four emotional body expressions (happy, sad, angry, fearful) with either a blurred face condition or a present face condition. Each expression was viewed twice by each infant for a total of 8-8 second trials. To examine whether infants’ first fixation location differed across emotion and area of interest (AOI), a mixed analysis of variance was conducted on the number of first fixations to each AOI across emotion with emotion (anger, fear, happy, sad) and AOI (upper body, face/head, legs, arms/hands) as a within-subjects factor and condition (face present, blurred) as a between-participant factor. There was a significant main effect of AOI, F(3, 342) = 36.40, p \u3c .001, h2 = .49. However, this main effect is “explained” by a significant interaction between AOI and emotion, F(9, 342) = 2.07, p = .031, h2 = .05. There was no evidence of difference in performance across conditions, therefore subsequent analyses were collapsed across this variable. Follow-up analyses probing the interaction between AOI and emotion indicate that the number of first looks to the legs and arms/hands AOIs varies across emotion. For example, infants’ first fixation was more often directed towards the arms/hands AOI when the emotion of the body expression was sad. Additionally, infants’ first fixation location was more often directed toward the legs AOI when the body expression was happy. In contrast, there was insufficient evidence to suggest differences across emotion nor AOI when analyzing the time it took infants to make their first fixation or with the duration of the first fixation. In summary, the location of infants’ first fixation on static images of emotional body expressions varied as a function of emotion. Moreover, infants’ performance was not affected by the presence/absence of facial emotional information. These findings suggest that socially relevant features within bodies are differentially attended to by at least 6.5 months of age. This kind of systematic scanning may lay the groundwork for mature knowledge of emotions and appropriate behavioral responses to other people’s emotion later in life

Association between Feeding Difficulties and Length of Hospital Stay among Infants Diagnosed with Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal Syndrome

Background: The incidence of neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome (NOWS), a drug withdrawal syndrome mainly associated with opioid exposure in-utero has significantly increased in the United States over the last decade with infants with NOWS staying longer in the hospital than those without NOWS. Objectives: To determine if feeding tube use while on admission is associated with length of hospital stay among infants diagnosed with NOWS. We also compared the differences between infants with NOWS who required the use of feeding tubes while on admission, and those that did not, based on infant and maternal characteristics. Methods: This was a retrospective cohort study of infants delivered between July 1, 2011 and June 30, 2016 at Ballad Health System. Our inclusion criteria were infants who were exposed to opioids in-utero and received a diagnosis of NOWS based on 2 consecutive Finnegan scores of 10, or 3 consecutive scores of 8, or treatment with morphine. Medical chart record of 294 infants who met these criteria were reviewed for infant and maternal characteristics. Our outcome variable was infant length of hospital stay and our predictor variable was feeding tube use an indicator for feeding difficulties. Chi-square test and t-test were used to compare infant and maternal characteristics by feeding tube use. Simple linear regression models were used to assess the effect of feeding tube use and infant and maternal characteristics on infant length of hospital stay. Multiple linear regression was used to model infant length of hospital stay predicted by feeding tube use, while adjusting for neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) admission, treatment with morphine, and maternal benzodiazepine use during pregnancy. All analyses were done using SAS 9.4. Results: Of the 294 infants diagnosed with NOWS, 22.11% had feeding difficulties that necessitated use of feeding tubes. Infants who used feeding tubes were significantly more likely to be born preterm (20.31% vs 8.73%, p=0.0096) to be admitted into the NICU (98.46% vs 51.09%, p

Development of Body Emotion Perception in Infancy: From Discrimination to Recognition

Research suggests that infants progress from discrimination to recognition of emotions in faces during the first half year of life. It is unknown whether the perception of emotions from bodies develops in a similar manner. In the current study, when presented with happy and angry body videos and voices, 5-month-olds looked longer at the matching video when they were presented upright but not when they were inverted. In contrast, 3.5-month-olds failed to match even with upright videos. Thus, 5-month-olds but not 3.5-month-olds exhibited evidence of recognition of emotions from bodies by demonstrating intermodal matching. In a subsequent experiment, younger infants did discriminate between body emotion videos but failed to exhibit an inversion effect, suggesting that discrimination may be based on low-level stimulus features. These results document a developmental change from discrimination based on non-emotional information at 3.5 months to recognition of body emotions at 5 months. This pattern of development is similar to face emotion knowledge development and suggests that both the face and body emotion perception systems develop rapidly during the first half year of life

The Role of Shape Recognition in Figure/Ground Perception in Infancy

In this study we sought to determine whether infants, like adults, utilize previous experience to guide figure/ground processing. After familiarization to a shape, 5-month-olds preferentially attended to the side of an ambiguous figure/ground test stimulus corresponding to that shape, suggesting that they were viewing that portion as the figure. Infants’ failure to exhibit this preference in a control condition in which both sides of the test stimulus were displayed as figures indicated that the results in the experimental condition were not due to a preference between two figure shapes. These findings demonstrate for the first time that figure/ground processing in infancy is sensitive to top-down influence. Thus, a critical aspect of figure/ground processing is functional early in life

Development of Body Emotion Perception in Infancy_ From Discrimination to Recognition.pdf

Research suggests that infants progress from discrimination to recognition of emotions in faces during the first half year of life. It is whether the perception of emotions from bodies develops in a similar manner. In the current study, when presented with happy and angry body videos and voices, 5-month-olds looked longer at the matching video when they were presented upright but not when they were inverted. In contrast, 3.5-month-olds failed to match even with upright videos. Thus, 5-month-olds but not 3.5-month-olds exhibited evidence of recognition of emotions from bodies by demonstrating intermodal matching. In a subsequent experiment, younger infants did discriminate between body emotion videos but failed to exhibit an inversion effect, suggesting that discrimination may be based on low-level stimulus features. These results document a developmental change from discrimination based on non-emotional information at 3.5 months to recognition of body emotions at 5 months. This pattern of development is similar to face emotion knowledge development and suggests that both the face and body emotion perception systems develop rapidly during the first half year of life

Experimental Evidence of Structural Representation of Hands in Early Infancy

Hands convey important social information, such as an individual’s emotions, goals, and desires, are used to direct attention through pointing, and are a major organ for haptic perception. However, very little is known about infants’ representation of human hands. In Experiment 1, infants tested in a familiarization/novelty preference task discriminated between images of intact hands and images that contained first-order structure distortions (i.e., with locations of fingers altered to result in an unnatural configuration). In Experiment 2, infants tested in a spontaneous preference task exhibited a preference for scrambled hand images over intact images, indicating that 3.5-month-olds have gained sufficient sensitivity to the configural properties of hands to discriminate between intact versus scrambled images without any training in the laboratory. In both procedures, infants’ performance was disrupted by the inversion of images, suggesting that infants’ performance in upright conditions was not based on low-level features. These results indicate that sensitivity to the structure of hands develops early in life. This may lay the foundation for the development of the functional use of hand information for social communication

Dichotomous Perception of Animal Categories in Infancy

Although there is a wealth of knowledge on categorization early in life, there are still many unanswered questions about the nature of category representation in infancy. For example, it is unclear whether infants are sensitive to boundaries between complex categories, such as types of animals, or whether young infants exhibit such sensitivity without explicit experience in the lab. Using a morphing technique, we linearly altered the category composition of images and measured 6.5-month-olds’ attention to pairs of animal faces that either did or did not cross the categorical boundary, with the stimuli in each pair being equally dissimilar from one another across the two types of image pairs. Results indicated that infants dichotomize the continua between cats and dogs and between cows and otters, but only when the images are presented in their canonical, upright orientations. These findings demonstrate a propensity to dichotomize early in life that could have implications for social categorizations, such as race and gender

Sex-Specific Scanning in Infancy: Developmental Changes in the Use of Face/Head and Body Information

The current investigation sought to differentiate between contrasting perspectives of body knowledge development by determining whether infants’ adult-like scanning of male and female bodies is dependent on relevant information from the face/head alone, the body alone, or a combination of both sources. Scanning patterns of 3.5-, 6.5-, and 9-month-olds (N = 80) in response to images that contained information relevant to sex classification in either the face/head or the body were examined. The results indicate that sex-specific scanning in the presence of only one source of relevant information (i.e., face/head or body) is present only at 9 months. Thus, although sex-specific scanning of bodies emerges as early as 3.5 months, information from both faces/heads and bodies is required until sometime between 6.5 and 9 months of age. These findings constrain theories of the development of social perception by documenting the complex interplay between body and face/head processing early in lif

Development of Body Emotion Perception in Infancy: From Discrimination to Recognition

Research suggests that infants progress from discrimination to recognition of emotions in faces during the first half year of life. It is whether the perception of emotions from bodies develops in a similar manner. In the current study, when presented with happy and angry body videos and voices, 5-month-olds looked longer at the matching video when they were presented upright but not when they were inverted. In contrast, 3.5-month-olds failed to match even with upright videos. Thus, 5-month-olds but not 3.5-month-olds exhibited evidence of recognition of emotions from bodies by demonstrating intermodal matching. In a subsequent experiment, younger infants did discriminate between body emotion videos but failed to exhibit an inversion effect, suggesting that discrimination may be based on low-level stimulus features. These results document a developmental change from discrimination based on non-emotional information at 3.5 months to recognition of body emotions at 5 months. This pattern of development is similar to face emotion knowledge development and suggests that both the face and body emotion perception systems develop rapidly during the first half year of life