Are Emotions Involved in Infants’ Evaluation of Helping and Hindering Actions?

• In Event: Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Topic - Moral Development

Abstract

A long-debated question in moral research is whether moral judgments are driven by controlled, deliberative processes or by automatic, emotional processes (Huebner et al., 2009). One way to shed light on this question is to explore whether emotions are involved in early forms of sociomoral evaluations. A growing literature has shown that infants prefer characters who perform prosocial (versus antisocial) behaviors, suggesting that rudimentary aspects of sociomoral evaluations develop early in life (for review, see Hamlin & Sitch, 2020). However, it remains largely unclear whether emotions are involved in these evaluations. Using a blind coder rating procedure, a recent study found that infants and toddlers showed more positive facial expressions after viewing puppet shows depicting prosocial (versus antisocial) events (Steckler et al., 2018), providing preliminary evidence that emotions are implicated in infants’ processing of sociomoral scenes. However, the effects observed in the study were small. To clarify the role of emotions in early sociomoral evaluation, the current study assessed infants’ emotional responses to sociomoral scenarios using facial electromyography (EMG), a technology that provides objective measures of moment-to-moment facial expressions.

Thirty-two 18-month-old infants viewed 2 sets of 6 videos depicting helping/hindering scenarios. In these scenarios, a climber repeatedly tried but failed to reach the top of a hill. On his third attempt, the climber was helped by a character who pushed him up the hill or hindered by a character who pushed him down the hill. Past research has found that, after being habituated to these events, infants looked longer at and preferentially reached toward the helper over the hinderer (Hamlin et al., 2007, 2010), suggesting that they more positively evaluate the helper. To explore whether infants show negative/positive emotions to hindering/helping scenarios, we assessed infants’ facial activities over corrugator supercilii (brow; a muscle involved in crying) and zygomaticus major (cheek; a muscle involved in smiling). Adult research has robustly found that corrugator is activated during negative emotional states and inhibited during positive emotions, and that zygomaticus is activated during positive emotions (Larsen et al., 2003). Studies have also found that infants respond to angry/happy movements and crying/laughing face-vocalization pairings with matching corrugator/zygomaticus activities (Addabbo et al., 2019; Isomura & Nakano, 2016), providing evidence for the links between corrugator/zygomaticus activities and negative/positive emotions in infants.

Results found that infants showed different corrugator (brow) activities when helping and hindering interactions took place. Specifically, infants showed higher corrugator activities for hindering (versus helping) when the climber was first pushed down by the hinderer (versus pushed up by the helper; cluster-based permutation test p=.04), and then showed lower corrugator activities for hindering (versus helping) after the pushing actions were finished (cluster-based permutation test p=.02). No corrugator effects were found in other phases of the scenario (i.e., before or after helping/hindering interactions), nor were there effects in zygomaticus (cheek) activities throughout helping/hindering events. These results suggest that infants’ emotional valence changes when they view helping and hindering events unfold, providing further evidence that emotional processes are involved in infants’ processing of sociomoral scenarios.

Authors

• Enda Tan, University of Maryland - College Park
  Presenting Author

• J. Kiley Hamlin, University of British Columbia (UBC)
  Non-Presenting Author