Article
Emotional Facial Expressions in European-American, Japanese, and Chinese Infants
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
(2003)
Abstract
Charles Darwin was among the first to recognize the important
contribution that infant studies could make to our understanding of human
emotional expression. Noting that infants come to exhibit many emotions,
he also observed that at first their repertoire of expression is highly
restricted. Today, considerable controversy exists regarding the question
of whether infants experience and express discrete emotions. According to
one position, discrete emotions emerge during infancy along with their
prototypic facial expressions. These expressions closely resemble adult
emotional expressions and are invariantly concordant with their corresponding
emotions. In contrast, we propose that the relation between expression
and emotion during infancy is more complex. Some infant
emotions and emotional expressions may not be invariantly concordant.
Furthermore, infant emotional expressions may be less differentiated than
previously proposed. Together with past developmental studies, recent
cross-cultural research supports this view and suggests that negative emotional
expression in particular is only partly differentiated towards the end
of the first year.
Keywords
- emotional facial expressions,
- infants,
- culture,
- emotion
Disciplines
Publication Date
2003
DOI
10.1196/annals.1280.007
Citation Information
Linda A. Camras, Harriet Oster, Joseph J. Campos and Roger Bakeman. "Emotional Facial Expressions in European-American, Japanese, and Chinese Infants" Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences Vol. 1000 (2003) p. 135 - 151 ISSN: 0077-8923 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/linda_camras/25/