Mimicking emotions: how 3–12-month-old infants use the facial expressions and eyes of a model

ABSTRACT

While there is an extensive literature on the tendency to mimic emotional expressions in adults, it is unclear how this skill emerges and develops over time. Specifically, it is unclear whether infants mimic discrete emotion-related facial actions, whether their facial displays are moderated by contextual cues and whether infants’ emotional mimicry is constrained by developmental changes in the ability to discriminate emotions. We therefore investigate these questions using Baby-FACS to code infants’ facial displays and eye-movement tracking to examine infants’ looking times at facial expressions. Three-, 7-, and 12-month-old participants were exposed to dynamic facial expressions (joy, anger, fear, disgust, sadness) of a virtual model which either looked at the infant or had an averted gaze. Infants did not match emotion-specific facial actions shown by the model, but they produced valence-congruent facial responses to the distinct expressions. Furthermore, only the 7- and 12-month-olds displayed negative responses to the model’s negative expressions and they looked more at areas of the face recruiting facial actions involved in specific expressions. Our results suggest that valence-congruent expressions emerge in infancy during a period where the decoding of facial expressions becomes increasingly sensitive to the social signal value of emotions.

KEYWORDS:

• Infant
• emotional mimicry
• facial expressions
• gaze direction

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the parents and infants who agreed to take part in the study, and Sylviane Martin for recruiting participating families.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s ).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the French National Research Agency [grant number EMCO 00902: SELFREADEMO project].