Journal
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL CHILD PSYCHOLOGY
Volume 147, Issue -, Pages 100-110Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE INC
DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2016.03.005
Keywords
Emotion processing; Attention; Facial emotion; Emotion and motor development; Social perception; Negativity bias
Funding
- National Science Foundation [BCS-1121096]
- National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [HD075829]
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Appropriate processing of emotions is paramount for successful social functioning. Adults' enhanced attention to negative emotions such as fear is thought to be a critical aspect of this adaptive functioning. Prior studies indicate that increased attention to fear relative to positive or neutral emotions begins at around 7 months of age, and it has been suggested that this negativity bias is related to self-locomotion. However,these studies mostly used static faces, potentially limiting information available to the infants. In the current study, 3.5-month-olds (n = 24) and 5-month-olds (n = 24) were exposed to dynamic faces expressing fear, happy, or neutral emotions and a distracting peripheral checkerboard. The 5 month-olds looked proportionally longer at the face compared with the checkerboard when the face was fearful than when it was happy or neutral. Conversely, the 3.5-month-olds did not differentiate their attention as a function of emotion. These results indicate that the onset of enhanced attention to fear occurs between 3.5 and 5 months of age. This finding raises questions about the developmental mechanisms that drive attentional bias given that the idea of the onset of self-locomotion being a catalyst for the development of negativity bias might no longer hold. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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