Introduction
The article “How Do You Feel? Preverbal Infants Match Negative Emotions to Events” is authored by Ashley L. Ruba, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Betty M. Repacholi, all of whom hail from the University of Washington. The article aims to explore the ability to categorize emotions in preverbal infants. It is known that children in this age group are able to distinguish between positive and negative emotions, as well as recognize the intensity of such emotions (Ruba et al., 2019).
Nonetheless, it remains to be tested whether they are able to distinguish emotions of the same intensity and valence. The study comprises three experiments to determine whether infants associate several highly arousing, negative emotions with specific eliciting experiences, thereby learning more about the conceptual classifications of various emotions in preverbal infants.
Description of the Experiments
The three experiments covered in the article are designed to circumvent the common limitations of studies on the subject, namely the failure to test the ability of infants to differentiate same-spectrum emotions. The method employed is based on the concept of social referencing, where infants rely on others to determine the appropriate emotional response to an event. For the experiments, infants aged 14 and 18 months were involved. For Experiment 1, a sample of 72 infants was used, while 72 and 48 infants participated in Experiments 2 and 3, respectively (Ruba et al., 2019).
The infants were shown prerecorded reactions of the so-called “emoter” experimenter to such events as trying new food or failing to reach a toy. The primary determinant of whether the infants were able to differentiate between emotions was the amount of time spent looking at the reaction that was incongruent with the event. For example, it was hypothesized that infants would look longer at the emoter showing disgust instead of anger while failing to reach for a toy.
Although the hypothesis was not confirmed in some experiments, the overall picture suggests that infants possess some of the theorized ability to distinguish same-spectrum emotions. Experiment 1 concluded that infants looked longer at the emoter, showing an incongruent emotion during the toy event; however, this was not the case for the strange food event (Ruba et al., 2019). Most likely, this part of the experiment failed due to event framing, where the infants may have been confused by the experimenter placing the food into their own bowl, possibly suggesting familiarity with it (Ruba et al., 2019).
This was successfully rectified in Experiment 2, where the experimenter fed the food to the infant by another one, and the infant confirmed the hypothesis as expected. Moreover, Experiment 2 featured an event where the emoter reacted to a strange toy jumping out of the box to measure the infants’ reaction to fear; however, the hypothesis was not confirmed. Finally, Experiment 3 partially replicated the findings of previous experiments (Ruba et al., 2019). To conclude, this set of experiments partially confirmed the hypothesis, indicating that infants can identify certain emotions.
Conclusion
As the hypothesis was only partially confirmed, this article suggests that there are still unanswered questions. In particular, the inconsistency of the results highlights a critical dilemma: whether the ability of infants to identify emotions is correlated with their prior experience with this emotion (Ruba et al., 2019). If infants have personally experienced certain emotion-event pairings in their daily lives, they are more likely to build event-emotion matches than when these pairings are relatively unfamiliar. Whether this is true or not remains to be studied.
Reference
Ruba A. L., Meltzoff, A. N., & Repacholi, B. M. (2019). How Do You Feel? Preverbal Infants Match Negative Emotions to Events. Developmental Psychology, 55(6), 1138–1149.