In a series of experiments that included 230 participants, 1-4 years of age, researchers report that understanding of emotions in early childhood might be more advanced than previously thought; the researchers measured looking and searching behaviors of the 12-17-month-old participants in a set of tasks, and found that the infants distinguished between five positive emotional expressions and matched the emotions to probable causes as well as actively searched for the cause of an emotional reaction if the apparent cause was incongruent with the emotion.
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Article #17-07715: "One- to four-year-olds connect diverse positive emotional vocalizations to their probable causes," by Yang Wu, Paul Muentener, and Laura Schulz.
MEDIA CONTACT: Yang Wu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; tel: 617-922-6175; e-mail: <yangwu@mit.edu>
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences