3-162 - The Downstream Consequences of Face Experience on Emotion and Social Processing

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

The development of perceptual facial biases for specific groups of experienced people or individuals (e.g., mother’s face, female face, own-race faces) in the first year of life is well established. However, the downstream consequences of their experiences with faces, and facial biases, on processing social and emotional input are not well understood.

The first talk will present findings from an investigation that examines the influence of face biases on learning from following eye-gaze during the first year. The authors report that the development of early face processing biases for race and gender influence infants’ attention to and learning about objects that are cued by eye-gaze. The second talk will present results from an investigation examining the role of infants’ own-race face bias in the perception of emotional signals (i.e., happy and sad music). The authors report that relative to younger infants, older infants showed increased looking to own-race faces when paired with happy music and other-race faces when paired with sad music. The third speaker will present an investigation examining the relation between caregiver negative affect and infants’ emotion discrimination. Authors report that infants of parents scoring low on negative affect readily discriminated neutral and happy facial expressions, whereas infants of parents scoring high on negative affect showed no discrimination. The discussant will highlight key results presented in the three talks and relate the findings to research examining the influence of experience on attention to and learning from social cues throughout development and into adulthood.

Sub Unit

• Perceptual, Sensory, Motor

Chair

• Lisa Sarah Scott, University of Massachusetts- Amherst

Discussant

• Nim Tottenham, Columbia Univ

Individual Presentations

• Do You See What Eye See? The Influence of Perceptual Tuning on Eye Gaze Following and Object Processing During Infancy - Presenting Author: Charisse B Pickron, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Eswen Elizabeth Fava, UMASS Amherst; Lisa Sarah Scott, University of Massachusetts- Amherst

• Emergence of Racial Biases in Infancy - Presenting Author: Naiqi Xiao, 10Charge; Paul C Quinn, University of Delaware; Wen S Xiao, University of Toronto; shaoying Liu, Department of Psychology; Liezhong Ge, Department of psychology, Zhejiang SCI-TECH university; Olivier Pascalis, Université Pierre Mendes France; Kang Lee, University of Toronto

• Emotional Environment is Related to Infants’ Scanning and Discrimination of Neutral and Happy Faces - Presenting Author: Cara H Cashon, University of Louisville; Nicholas Holt, University of Louisville; Janet Woodruff-Borden, University of Louisville