Infant Discrimination of Facial Expressions

Abstract

YOUNG-BROWNE, GAIL; ROSENFELD, HOWARD M.; and HOROWITZ, FRANCES DEGEN. Infant Discrimination of Facial Expressions. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1977, 48, 555-562. An infant control habituation-recovery procedure was used to study 3-month-old infants' discrimination of sad, happy, and surprise facial expressions. 24 experimental infants were habituated to a facial expression and then presented another expression. Following response decrement to the second expression, a third expression was presented. Discrimination was measured by increases in looking time following presentation of a new expression. Relative to 12 no-stimulus-change control subjects, the results indicated that the experimental subjects significantly discriminated the surprise from the happy and, sometimes, from the sad expressions. Prior research assessing infant discrimination of facial expressions by comparing overall fixation times had not found significant effects earlier than 5 months. The fact that no significant differences in mean looking time were found in the present study indicates that the habituation-recovery paradigm is a more sensitive procedure for measuring infant facial discrimination.