The development of emotion perception in face and voice during infancy

Abstract

Purpose: Interacting with others by reading their emotional expressions is an essential social skill in humans. How this ability develops during infancy and what brain processes underpin infants' perception of emotion in different modalities are the questions dealt with in this paper.

Methods: Literature review.

Results: The first part provides a systematic review of behavioral findings on infants' developing emotion-reading abilities. The second part presents a set of new electrophysiological studies that provide insights into the brain processes underlying infants' developing abilities. Throughout, evidence from unimodal (face or voice) and multimodal (face and voice) processing of emotion is considered. The implications of the reviewed findings for our understanding of developmental models of emotion processing are discussed.

Conclusions: The reviewed infant data suggest that (a) early in development, emotion enhances the sensory processing of faces and voices, (b) infants' ability to allocate increased attentional resources to negative emotional information develops earlier in the vocal domain than in the facial domain, and (c) at least by the age of 7 months, infants reliably match and recognize emotional information across face and voice.