Describing the emotional environment of the infant from 6 to 17 months

Describing the Emotional Environment of the Infant, from 6 to 17 Months Understanding and recognizing emotions is critical for children’s social interactions, enabling them to appropriately respond to others’ needs, make predictions about social interactions, and even regulate their own emotional responses. Importantly, we currently know very little about infants’ natural exposure to emotion information, limiting our subsequent understanding of how infants develop emotion categories, how they learn to use emotion information to guide action and build expectations about social interactions, and how specific experiences or individual differences shape development in these domains. Here, we will take the first step in addressing this issue by using three existing datasets of infants interacting with their caregivers at home and in the lab to characterize their real-world experience with emotion information across the first year and a half of life. First, we will describe infants’ exposure to emotion information by coding video segments with facial information for emotional expressions, as well as assess the degree of variation in these facial movements. We will then describe exposure to emotion language using transcriptions to identify the emotion labels most often used by caregivers. Using the coded video data, we will then examine how emotion language and facial information appear jointly in the infant’s social environment. Finally, we will examine two concurrent domains— motor development and language development—as potential transitions for developmental change in exposure to emotion information, by using monthly vocabulary/gesture checklists and motor questionnaires available with one of the datasets. Altogether, the proposed work will provide a foundation for a new and potentially transformative approach to studying the development of emotion understanding. Further, by characterizing the emotional input common of typically developing infants, we might gain a better understanding of how atypical emotional environments, such as those hypothesized to be associated with depressed, anxious, or abusive parents, might shape maladaptive trajectories of emotional behavior.