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Abstract
Research shows that pacifiers disrupt infants' mimicry of facial expressions. This experiment examines whether pacifiers interfere with caretakers' ability to mimic infants' emotions. Adults saw photographs of infants with or without a pacifier. When infants had pacifiers, perceivers showed reduced EMG activity to infants' smiles. Smiles of infants using a pacifier were also rated as less happy than smiles depicted without a pacifier. The same pattern was observed for expressions of distress: adults rated infants presented with pacifiers as less sad than infants without pacifiers. We discuss deleterious effects of pacifier use for the perceiver's resonance with a child's emotions.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank Pierre Chausse for his help with EMG recordings and Sophie Monceau for her work as experimenter.
Notes
1Data were analyzed separately with and without the data from participants who were mothers. As the patterns of results were identical in both cases, data from all participants were included in the analyses described next.
2We since replicated the findings of the present study in a larger between-subjects design involving 164 participants. Details of the method and raw data are available upon request.
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