The Effect Of Angry And Fearful Expressions On Perceptual Narrowing Of Other-Race Faces In Infants

Face racial perceptual narrowing means that as infants grow older,they gradually develop from recognizing faces of all races broadly to recognizing faces of their own race.The perceptual-social linkage hypothesis suggests an interaction between social processing and face perceptual processing.It has been found that facial expressions can affect the infants’ face racial perceptual narrowing.Compared to neutral condition,happy and angry expressions can improve the recognition of other faces of 9-month-old infants.So whether all expressions can change the infants’ face racial perceptual narrowing?Fearful expression has the same negative emotion valence and high motivation intensity as angry expression,but differs from the motivation direction of anger and happiness,and belongs to avoidance motivation.The present study designed three experiments to examine 9-month-old infants’ recognition of other-race faces and their eye-movement patterns in neutral,angry,and fearful conditions to answer the following research questions: 1)whether fearful expression can also affect infants’ recognition of other-race faces as well as angry expression,2)infants’ eye-movement scanning patterns of angry and fearful other-race faces and their relationship to other-race face recognition.Experiment 1 used an improved visual pairwise comparison paradigm using eyetracking technology to examine whether 16 9-month-old infants could recognize otherrace faces after becoming familiar with neutral other-race faces,using neutral African female faces as the material.The results showed that the infants’ scores of novelty preference for other-race faces did not differ significantly from the random level,i.e.,the infants could not recognize other-race faces.Experiment 2a utilized the same technique and paradigm as Experiment 1,using angry African female faces with the same identity as the neutral condition,to examine whether 16 9-month-old infants could recognize other-race neutral faces after becoming familiar with other-race angry faces.Results showed that infants in the angry condition scored significantly higher than random levels of novelty preference for other-race faces,i.e.,infants were able to recognize other-race faces.To determine the effect of facial features of expression on infant recognition of other faces,Experiment 2b examined whether 16 9-month-old infants could recognize other faces using angry faces without external features.The results showed that infants scored significantly higher than the randomized level of novelty preference for other faces and that infants were able to recognize angry other faces,excluding the effect of external features of faces.Using the same technique and paradigm as Experiment 1,Experiment3 examined whether 16 9-month-old infants could recognize other-race neutral faces after they became familiar with other-race fearful faces,using the fearful African female face material.The results showed that the infants’ scores of novelty preference for other-race faces did not differ significantly from the random level and that the infants could not recognize other-race faces.Combining the eye-movement results from Experiments 1,2 and 3 revealed that 1)Characteristic gaze: during the familiarization phase,infants spent a lower proportion of time gazing at the nose region in the angry condition than in the neutral condition,and a lower proportion of time gazing at face features overall than in the fearful condition;the difference between the conditions was not significant during the test phase.2)Scanning paths: during the familiarization phase,infants spent a higher proportion of their intraand interfacial scanning path frequency in the angry and fearful conditions than in the neutral condition.proportion was higher in the angry condition than in the neutral condition,and infants had a higher proportion of feature retention scanning path frequency in the anger condition than in the neutral and fearful conditions;during the test phase,infants had a higher proportion of interfacial path frequency in the angry and fearful conditions than in the neutral condition.3)The relationship between characteristic gaze and recognition performance: in the angry condition,there was a negative correlation between infants’ gaze time in the nose region during the familiar phase and recognition performance of other-race faces in the test phase There was a positive correlation between the difference in gaze between old and new faces in the eye region and the recognition performance of other faces in the test phase;the correlations between face feature gaze time and recognition performance were not significant in both the neutral and fear conditions.In conclusion,the present study found that anger expressions improved face recognition of other-race faces in 9-month-old infants,while fearful expression did not.The correlations between eye movement patterns and recognition performance differed between the angry and fearful conditions.This suggests that approach motivation of expressions may be the reason for the infants’ face racial perceptual narrowing changed by expressions.The results of this study advance the research on the influence of facial expressions on the infants’ face racial perceptual narrowing and enrich the evidence from infant studies that face social processing interacts with face perception.