Infants' Monitoring of Social Interactions: The Effect of Emotional Cues

Relying on information about the emotional state of others is vital for a proper monitoring and representation of social interactions. We tested the impact of vocal emotional cues on 12-month-old infants' monitoring of animated movies that involved the separation of a smaller and a larger oval shape. The separation was accompanied by the sound of either a crying or a laughing baby and was followed either by the return of the larger figure to, or its further separation from, the smaller figure. Eye tracking showed that infants' monitoring pattern was influenced by the type of emotional signal during both the separation phase and the response phase of the animations: During the separation phase infants fixated longer at the larger figure if the separation was accompanied by a crying sound than if laughter could be heard. In the response phase, the influence of the emotional signal depended on the type of response. Infants overall looked more often at the animations during the crying than the laughter sound but only when the larger figure did not return to the smaller figure. These results suggest that infants are able to integrate vocal emotional cues in their representation of observed interactions. Our findings are also discussed in relation to the source of negativity bias in infants' information processing.