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Essay on Infants and Emotions
Important advances have recently been made in studying emotions in infants and the nature of emotional communication between infants and adults. Infant emotions and emotional communications are far more organized than previously thought. Infants display a variety of discrete affective expressions that are appropriate to the nature of events and their context. They also appreciate the emotional meaning of the affective displays of caretakers. The emotional expressions of the infant and the caretaker function to allow them to mutually regulate their interactions. Indeed, it appears that a major determinant of children's development is related to the operation of this communication system.
Positive development may be associated with the experience of coordinated interactions characterized by frequent reparations of interactive errors and the transformation of negative affect into positive affect, whereas negative development appears to be associated with sustained periods of interactive failure and negative affect.Emotions in infants are expressed by facial reactions. These reactions can be read through careful observations. According to Dr. Restak in his book entitled The Infant Mind, there are many distinct areas of the face that contribute to emotion. "Eyebrows, forehead, eyes, eyelids, nose, cheeks, mouth-- each of these regions assumes a distinct facial muscle pattern according to the emotion ascendant at the time" (200). There are many different patterns of facial movements which represent each different emotion.
Infants generally begin to recognize emotional expressions after 6 months of age; some reports have even observed recognition in neonates. Emotional recognition is important for social referencing, in which infants "read" their parents' expressions to understand events. Three methods for studying how infants come to recognize emotion are described in this article: peek-a-boo, matching faces and voices, and multimodal presentation.Researchers are studying how much infants respond to the emotions around them, even before they can label them and interpret the meaning of what they see and hear.....
