Poster #196 - Infants use Emotional Expressions Observed in one Situation to Predict the Expresser’s Behavior in Another

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

We express emotion toward a target object not only when we discover the object alone (one-object situation), but also when we find the target together with another object (two-object situation). To use others’ emotional expressions efficiently, we need to understand that others’ emotional attitudes are consistent across different situations.
In previous studies indicating infants’ ability to understand others’ emotional expressions, the two-object situation was used during both a learning phase and a test phase (Phillips et al., 1995; Vaish & Woodward, 2014). These studies demonstrated that, after watching an actor express a happy emotion toward a target object but not toward a distractor during the learning phase, 14-month-olds looked longer at the actor holding the distractor and not the target than at the actor holding the target and not the distractor. However, whether infants use emotional expressions observed in one situation (e.g. one-object situation) to predict the expressers’ behavior in a different situation (e.g. two-object situation) remains unclear.
This study aims to investigate this problem. We tested thirty two 14-month-olds, who were assigned to either the happy or the control (attention) condition. The experiment comprised a familiarization phase and a test phase. During the familiarization phase, infants in a happy condition saw an actor express a happy emotion toward a target in a one-object situation with no other object in view. Infants in the control condition saw an actor gaze at the target in one-object situation without expressing any emotion. During the test phase, infants in both conditions saw the target scene and the distractor scene. In the target scene, the actor reached for the target with another object (a distractor) in view (two-object situation). In the distractor scene the actor reached for the distractor in the two-object situation.
If infants regarded others’ emotional expressions as consistent across one-object and two-object situations, those in a happy condition would looked longer at the distractor scene than at the target scene, resulting in infants prediction that the actor would not reach for the distractor, but for the target. The control (attention) condition was used to examine whether infants regard others’ interest (attention) as consistent across situations. If so, infants in the control (attention) condition would also look at the distractor scene longer than at the target scene. Alternatively, if they did not regard attention alone as consistent across situations, looking times of the two scenes did not differ in the happy condition.
The analyses revealed that infants in a happy condition looked longer at the distractor scene than at the target scene (p < .05), whereas looking times for the two test scenes did not differ in the control condition (p > .10). These results indicated that 14-month-olds use not attentional information but a happy emotion shown in the one-object situation to predict the expresser’s behavior in another situation.

Authors

• Toshinori Kaneshige, University of Tokyo
  Presenting Author

• Etsuko Haryu, University of Tokyo
  Non-Presenting Author

• Mai Hamana, University of Tokyo
  Non-Presenting Author

• Shinnosuke Ikeda, University of Tokyo
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jiamin Huang, University of Tokyo
  Non-Presenting Author