The development of emotional facial expression discrimination by infants in the first year of life

By Laurie Bayet, Olivier Pascalis, Édouard Gentaz
English

Here we review the studies of emotional facial expression discrimination by newborns and infants in the first year of life. These studies show that 1. sensitivity to changes in facial expression and an attraction to smiling faces might exist in newborns, and are present in the first months of life, 2. the ability to discriminate joy from several other expressions appears before six months of age, 3. older infants (aged six or seven months) show an attraction to fearful faces due to attentional effects, and 4. those older infants begin to develop the ability to discriminate between several expressions other than joy. We then discuss the sensitivity of the infants to the genuinely emotional content of facial expressions, which is left more or less unresolved by the reviewed studies, and some possible causal explanations for its development.

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