IRFP: Children's Understanding of Cues to Emotion: Attentional Mechanisms and Social Interactions

Nelson Nicole L, Boston MA

Investigators

Abstract

The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twenty-four-month research fellowship by Dr. Nicole L. Nelson to work with Dr. Catherine Mondloch at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. This research is the first to explore how children attend to and integrate emotion cues and how this integration is influenced by social interaction. Using eye-tracking technology and children's emotional judgments, the lab-based experiments in this project will examine (1) whether preschoolers' visual attention is affected by the inclusion of contextual information (posture, background scenes), and whether their eye fixation patterns (focusing on the face, posture or background) predict their emotion judgments; (2) whether children's eye fixation patterns vary with social interaction (as opposed to passive viewing) and whether children's facial and postural mimicry of others' expressions results in better emotion recognition; (3) whether children's emotional judgments improve when presented with three-dimensional emotional stimuli, rather than two-dimensional (i.e. video or photographs). In everyday life, we determine others' emotions by considering a variety of cues, such as their facial expressions, body posture, vocal intonation and the situational context in which the emotion occurred; little is known about how children make sense of all this information. Using eye-tracking technology this research will determine which cues children find most powerful (facial or contextual) in determining others' emotions and whether the cues they rely on vary when they are interacting with others as opposed to passively watching them. This research will also determine whether expressions presented three-dimensionally are better recognized than two-dimensional videos or photographs. In addition to improving our knowledge about the development of emotion recognition from complex and realistic stimuli, this research will also develop collaborative projects between the PI and research groups at Brock University in St. Catharines (Dr. Catherine Mondloch), Canada.