Happiness

Infant facial cues aren't just limited to static, immobile cues. Emotional cues also greatly influence adults. Much of our work with different emotions comes from our Virtual Infant Paradigm. Using that paradigm, we have found that adults are very sensitive to emotional facial cues, and that the presence or absence of those cues can influence how adults perceive the face overall. For example, given two identitical faces, the child who smiles more will be perceived as being cuter, more adoptable, and healthier, even though the faces are identical. So emotional cues can play a strong role in influence adults' perceptions and judgements related to parental care. More work is needed on this area, and we hope to report more when we complete our Virtual Infant studies.

Other Infant and Child Facial Cues that we've studied include:

Back to the Infant Faces Page.

Created on ... June 2, 2006