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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Quoc Vuong
This is the authors' accepted manuscript of an article that has been published in its final definitive form by Elsevier Ltd, 2020.
For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.
The human body is an important source of information to infer a person’s emotional state. Research with adult observers indicate that the posture of the torso, arms and hands provide important perceptual cues for recognising anger, fear and happy expressions. Much less is known about whether infants process body regions differently for different body expressions. To address this issue, we used eye tracking to investigate whether infants’ visual exploration patterns differed when viewing body expressions. Forty-eight 7-months-old infants were randomly presented with static images of adult female bodies expressing anger, fear and happiness, as well as an emotionally-neutral posture. Facial cues to emotional state were removed by masking the faces. We measured the proportion of looking time, proportion and number of fixations, and duration of fixations on the head, upper body and lower body regions for the different expressions. We showed that infants explored the upper body more than the lower body. Importantly, infants at this age fixated differently on different body regions depending on the expression of the body posture. In particular, infants spent a larger proportion of their looking times and had longer fixation durations on the upper body for fear relative to the other expressions. These results extend and replicate the information about infant processing of emotional expressions displayed by human bodies, and they support the hypothesis that infants’ visual exploration of human bodies is driven by the upper body.
Author(s): Geangu E, Vuong QC
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Infant Behavior and Development
Year: 2020
Volume: 60
Print publication date: 01/08/2020
Online publication date: 30/07/2020
Acceptance date: 27/07/2020
Date deposited: 30/07/2020
ISSN (print): 0163-6383
ISSN (electronic): 1879-0453
Publisher: Elsevier Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2020.101473
DOI: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2020.101473
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