Signatures of Emotional Face Processing Measured by Event-related Potentials in 7-month-old Infants

Overview

Journal Dev Psychobiol

Specialties Pediatrics
Psychiatry
Psychology

Date 2023 Feb 22

PMID 36811377

Authors

Ozlu Aran

Sarah E Garcia

Benjamin L Hankin

Daniel C Hyde

Elysia Poggi Davis

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

The ability to distinguish facial emotions emerges in infancy. Although this ability has been shown to emerge between 5 and 7 months of age, the literature is less clear regarding the extent to which neural correlates of perception and attention play a role in processing of specific emotions. This study's main goal was to examine this question among infants. To this end, we presented angry, fearful, and happy faces to 7-month-old infants (N = 107, 51% female) while recording event-related brain potentials. The perceptual N290 component showed a heightened response for fearful and happy relative to angry faces. Attentional processing, indexed by the P400, showed some evidence of a heightened response for fearful relative to happy and angry faces. We did not observe robust differences by emotion in the negative central (Nc) component, although trends were consistent with previous work suggesting a heightened response to negatively valenced expressions. Results suggest that perceptual (N290) and attentional (P400) processing is sensitive to emotions in faces, but these processes do not provide evidence for a fear-specific bias across components.

Citing Articles

Maternal anxiety during pregnancy predicts infant attention to affective faces.

Hennessey E, Swales D, Markant J, Hoffman M, Hankin B, Davis E J Affect Disord. 2023; 344:104-114.

PMID: 37802320 PMC: 10841611. DOI: 10.1016/j.jad.2023.09.031.

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