Project Abstract/Summary
Understanding and interpreting emotional expressions is important for social interactions. Emotion understanding helps people respond to others’ needs, make predictions about social interactions, and even control emotional responses. Research shows that children who are better at understanding emotions are perceived as more socially skilled by their teachers, more likable by their peers, and are better able to navigate aggressive interactions. However, it is not well understood how infants and young children learn about the emotions of others, mostly because the emotions that infants and children see in everyday life are not well understood. For decades, researchers have assumed that children learn from the stereotypic emotional expressions they see in pictures. Recent research suggests that in contrast to what was long assumed, the emotional expressions people actually make in real life do not look a lot like the stereotypes. This means that we still do not understand what input infants use to learn about emotions, and how that input informs their emotional understanding. Thus, in order to advance the understanding of emotional learning, this project documents the emotions infants see in the real world during everyday social interactions, and how what they see translates into what they know about emotions. By characterizing the emotional input common of typically developing infants, this project aims to pave the way to better understanding of how atypical emotional environments, such as those associated with depressed, anxious, or abusive parents, shape maladaptive trajectories of emotional behavior.
Project investigators plan to test infants at three different time points, at 6, 9, and 12 months of age. At each time point, researchers place a head-mounted camera on both the infants and their caregivers to record their emotional expressions during everyday interactions such as playing, feeding, and diaper changing. These video data are first used to (i) describe infants’ exposure to naturalistic emotion expressions between the ages of 6 and 12 months, and (ii) describe how caregivers respond to the emotional information provided by the infants themselves (such as crying, laughing, etc.). Next, the research team assesses whether emotional information provided by caregivers (emotional facial expressions and language) predicts infants’ performance on several tasks that measure what infants know about emotions. The outcome of this project is to provide insight into how naturalistic emotional information available to infants during everyday social interactions helps shape how infants learn about emotions over time. This project provides new insights into the natural input for the early development of emotion perception in infancy and lays the groundwork for research on the development of abstract emotion categories.
This award reflects NSF’s statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation’s intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
Principal Investigator
Vanessa LoBue – Rutgers University Newark located in NEWARK, NJ
Co-Principal Investigators
Lisa Oakes
Funders
Funding Amount
$648,938.00
Project Start Date
06/01/2024
Project End Date
05/31/2027
Will the project remain active for the next two years?
The project has more than two years remaining
Source: National Science Foundation
Please be advised that recent changes in federal funding schemes may have impacted the project’s scope and status.
Updated: April, 2025