The Relationship between Crawling and Emotion Discrimination in 9- to 10-Month-Old Infants

Abstract

The present study examined whether infants’ crawling experience is related to their sensitivity to fearful emotional expressions. Twenty-nine 9- to 10-month-old infants were tested in a preferential looking task, in which they were presented with different pairs of animated faces on a screen displaying a 100% happy facial expression and morphed facial expressions containing varying degrees of fear and happiness. Regardless of their crawling experiences, all infants looked longer at more fearful faces. Additionally, infants with at least 6 weeks of crawling experience needed lower levels of fearfulness in the morphs in order to detect a change from a happy to a fearful face compared to those with less crawling experience. Thus, the crawling experience seems to increase infants’ sensitivity to fearfulness in faces.

Keywords

• emotion discrimination
• crawling
• fear bias
• morphed facial expressions