Infants' Use of Conflicting Emotion Signals

Abstract

In this study, we examined whether 10-month-old infants' reactions to a novel toy are regulated by an experimenter's (E's) conflicting and nonconflicting, angry and happy emotion communications about that toy. Two clusters of variables served as measures of infants' responses: "ambivalence" (presence of both negative and positive facial emotion signals), and "uncertainty" (frequent and/or prolonged fixation of E, and/or reluctance to approach a novel toy). Results revealed that uncertainty responses were higher in conditions involving anger, whether these were conflicting or nonconflicting conditions. In addition, conflicting conditions induced greater ambivalence than did nonconflicting, angry signals. Finally, there was evidence that sequential conflict-conditions under which a clear-cut happy or angry signal is followed by clear-cut signals of the other emotionmay produce especially great uncertainty and/or ambivalence.