Babies Understand Each Other's Moods and Emotions: How Children 'Speak'

Ever wonder what a baby is thinking or what he's feeling? It turns out that it might be easier to deduce a child's mood than you might expect. Scientists have discovered that other babies can understand exactly what an infant is feeling, revealing a little bit more about how newborns interact with the world around them.

 
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"Newborns can't verbalize to their mom or dad that they are hungry or tired, so the first way they communicate is through affect or emotion," said Ross Flom, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Thus it is not surprising that in early development, infants learn to discriminate changes in affect."

In order to examine how infants perceive their peers' emotions, the researchers tested a baby's ability to match emotional infant vocalizations with a paired infant facial expression. They seated infants in front of two monitors; one of them displayed a video of a happy, smiling baby. The other displayed a video of a sad, frowning baby. When audio was played of a third, happy baby, the child seated in front of the monitors looked longer to the video of the happy baby. When the audio of an unhappy baby was played, the child looked toward the monitor of the baby displaying negative emotions. The audio that was played was not in sync with the lip movements of the babies in either video.

In the end, the researchers found that five-month-old infants can match their peers' positive and negative emotions. This reveals that babies can understand what other children are trying to communicate, probably because that's how they themselves convey what they're feeling.
"These findings add to our understanding of early infant development by reiterating the fact that babies are highly sensitive to and comprehend some level of emotion," said Flom in a news release. "Babies learn more in their first two and a half years of life than they do the rest of their lifespan, making it critical to examine how and what young infants learn and how this helps them learn other things."

Currently, the researchers are planning to move forward by further studying infant perception. They plan to test whether babies can identify emotions at even younger ages if they're watching clips of themselves.