Infants are sensitive to cultural differences in emotions at 11 months

PLoS One. 2021 Sep 30;16(9):e0257655. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0257655. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

A myriad of emotion perception studies has shown infants' ability to discriminate different emotional categories, yet there has been little investigation of infants' perception of cultural differences in emotions. Hence little is known about the extent to which culture-specific emotion information is recognised in the beginning of life. Caucasian Australian infants of 10-12 months participated in a visual-paired comparison task where their preferential looking patterns to three types of infant-directed emotions (anger, happiness, surprise) from two different cultures (Australian, Japanese) were examined. Differences in racial appearances were controlled. Infants exhibited preferential looking to Japanese over Caucasian Australian mothers' angry and surprised expressions, whereas no difference was observed in trials involving East-Asian Australian mothers. In addition, infants preferred Caucasian Australian mothers' happy expressions. These findings suggest that 11-month-olds are sensitive to cultural differences in spontaneous infant-directed emotional expressions when they are combined with a difference in racial appearance.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Australia
  • Child Development
  • Culture
  • Emotions*
  • Facial Expression
  • Humans
  • Infant
  • Male
  • Recognition, Psychology*
  • White People / psychology*

Grants and funding

This project was funded by an Early Career Researcher Grant and Vice Chancellor’s Professional Development Scholarship provided by Western Sydney University, as well as Research Fund and Start-up Grant provided by School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University. During the manuscript writing, the first author has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 798658 hosted by Center for Multilingualism across the Lifespan at the University of Oslo, financed by Research Council of Norway through its Centers of Excellence funding scheme grant agreement No. 223265. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.