Emotional facial expressions in European-American, Japanese, and Chinese infants.

Publisher: New York Academy of Sciences Country of Publication: United States NLM ID: 7506858 Publication Model: Print Cited Medium: Print ISSN: 0077-8923 (Print) Linking ISSN: 00778923 NLM ISO Abbreviation: Ann N Y Acad Sci Subsets: MEDLINE

Publication: 2006- : New York, NY : Malden, MA : New York Academy of Sciences ; Blackwell
Original Publication: New York, The Academy.

Affect* ; Culture* ; Facial Expression*; Animals ; China ; Cross-Cultural Comparison ; Europe/ethnology ; Gorilla gorilla ; Humans ; Infant ; Japan ; United States

Charles Darwin was among the first to recognize the important contribution that infant studies could make to our understanding of human emotional expression. Noting that infants come to exhibit many emotions, he also observed that at first their repertoire of expression is highly restricted. Today, considerable controversy exists regarding the question of whether infants experience and express discrete emotions. According to one position, discrete emotions emerge during infancy along with their prototypic facial expressions. These expressions closely resemble adult emotional expressions and are invariantly concordant with their corresponding emotions. In contrast, we propose that the relation between expression and emotion during infancy is more complex. Some infant emotions and emotional expressions may not be invariantly concordant. Furthermore, infant emotional expressions may be less differentiated than previously proposed. Together with past developmental studies, recent cross-cultural research supports this view and suggests that negative emotional expression in particular is only partly differentiated towards the end of the first year.

Date Created: 20040210 Date Completed: 20040326 Latest Revision: 20190616

20221213

10.1196/annals.1280.007

14766628