Abstract
Processing facial and vocal emotional expressions is a critical aspect of person perception. How this ability develops during infancy and what brain processes underpin infants’ perception of emotion in face and voice are the questions dealt with in this chapter. I present a set of new electrophysiological studies that provide insights into the brain processes underlying infants’ developing abilities. Evidence from unimodal (face or voice) and multimodal (face and voice) processing of emotion is considered. The reviewed infant data suggest that (1) early in development, emotion enhances the sensory processing of faces and voices, (2) infants’ ability to allocate increased attentional resources to negative emotional information develops earlier in the vocal domain than in the facial domain, (3) at least by the age of 7 months, infants reliably integrate and recognize emotional information across face and voice. Futhermore, I present some recent work suggesting that already in infancy genetic variation in neurotransmitter systems is associated with individual differences in facial and vocal emotion processing. Finally, I propose new directions for research in this area.
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Acknowledgments
The work on this chapter was supported by a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship awarded by the Wellcome Trust (082659/Z/07/Z). I would like to thank Amrisha Vaish for comments
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Grossman, T. (2013). The Early Development of Processing Emotions in Face and Voice. In: Belin, P., Campanella, S., Ethofer, T. (eds) Integrating Face and Voice in Person Perception. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3585-3_5
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