The role of facial emotional expression in 3-month-old recognition of an individual face

In contrast to traditional models on adults’ face processing, recent studies demonstrate that in adults personal identity recognition and expressed emotion recognition mutually interact (citazioni). Infants’ ability to recognize an individual face and infants’ capacity to process facial emotion expressions have been largely investigated, yet to date no study addressed in infancy the issue of the interaction between these two processes. The present study was aimed at investigating whether 3-month-old infants’ ability to recognize an individual face is affected by the positive (happiness) or neutral emotional expression displayed. After a 20-sec brief familiarization, Three-month-old infants were familiarized with a video of a woman’s face expressing a positive emotion (happiness) or displaying a neutral expression. The results show that infants’ face recognition abilities are enhanced when “face-stimuli” display an emotional expression. The project attempts to build a bridge between two areas of research – face recognition and processing of emotional expressions - that rarely have been taken into account together in the infancy literature.