Infant sensitivity to emotional behaviour derived from human biological motions

概要

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It has been reported that young infants recognise and discriminate human emotional expressions. They seem to prefer to look at facial expressions that are accompanied by matching vocal emotional expressions (Walker-Andrew, Montague, & Kahana-Kalman, 2000). Infants as young as 3.5 months are also sensitive to the moving figure of walking point light display- Biological Motions (Bertenthal, Proffitt, & Cutting, 1984). Whether or not infants' sensitivity to such human moving figures extends to emotional aspects of human behaviours was investigated. This study reports the preliminarily results on early understanding of human emotional behaviours inferred from Biological Motions presented on the screen monitor. Infants aged between 4 to 20 months were tested using a multimodal preferential looking paradigm in which two different Biological Motions, which depicted "happy" and "sad" were presented simultaneously with vocal expressions of either "happy" or "sad". Data collected so far suggest that infants seem to look longer at the Biological Motion that was congruent with the "happy" vocal expression. However, when infants heard the "sad" vocal expression, they preferred to look at the incongruent Biological Motion. The results were discussed with reference to the salience of Human Motion that might have triggered infants' sensitivity beyond their inferential understanding of human emotion from such Motion
大阪樟蔭女子大学の論文
2009-01-31