Effects of Gender on Infant Attention to Emotional Body Expressions
Location
D.P. Culp Center Ballroom
Start Date
4-5-2024 9:00 AM
End Date
4-5-2024 11:30 AM
Poster Number
160
Name of Project's Faculty Sponsor
Alyson Chroust
Faculty Sponsor's Department
Psychology
Competition Type
Competitive
Type
Poster Presentation
Presentation Category
Social Sciences
Abstract or Artist's Statement
Introduction: Previous research has shown that infants look to specific parts of the body depending on the emotion expressed by the body. Specifically, Geangu and Vuong (2020) found that 7-month-old infants look longer to fearful and angry bodies in comparison to happy bodies. Additionally, they look more to the upper body of fearful expressions compared to other emotional expressions. To our knowledge, no studies have examined whether the gender of the actors in the presented stimulus images impacts fixation to parts of emotional body expressions. The present study's goal was to examine the potential effect of the gender of the actors in the stimulus images on the looking behaviors of 6.5-month-old infants. Methods: Thirty-one 6.5-month-old infants were shown full body, black and white images of two female and two male actors portraying happy, angry, fearful, and sad expressions from the BEAST stimulus set (De Gelder & Van Den Stock, 2011). The faces of the actors were blurred. Each participant completed eight 8 second trials, viewing each emotional expression for the same actor twice. Infant visual fixations and looking times were recorded using a Tobii Tx300 eye-tracker. The dependent measure was the proportion fixation duration to three different AOIs: head, upper body (torso, arms, hands), and lower body (hips, legs, feet). Ten infants were excluded from analyses as they did not look at the images for at least 2 seconds. Results/Conclusion: A repeated-measure analysis of variance (RM ANOVA) with AOI (head, upper body, lower body) and expression (anger, fear, happy, sad) as within subject factors and stimuli gender (male, female) as a between-subject factor was conducted on infants’ proportion looking time. There was a main effect of AOI, F(2, 38) = 25.010, p < .001). Pairwise comparisons revealed significant differences in looking time between head and upper body AOIs (p < .001), head and lower body (p = .05), and upper and lower body (p < .001). All other main effects and interactions were not statistically significant (all p’s > .143). However, there were no significant differences found across emotion (F(3, 57) = 1.881, p = .143). In summary, this study failed to replicate the findings of Geangu and Vuong (2020) that infants visually explore the body regions of emotional expressions differently depending on emotion condition. Additionally, no significant effects by gender of the stimulus image were found. One possible reason for the differences found in this study is the stimulus presentation time, as Geangu and Vuong (2020) presented each stimulus for only 4 seconds each. Additionally, the smaller sample size in this study (N = 21) may have been insufficient to detect any effects of emotional expression and gender.
Effects of Gender on Infant Attention to Emotional Body Expressions
D.P. Culp Center Ballroom
Introduction: Previous research has shown that infants look to specific parts of the body depending on the emotion expressed by the body. Specifically, Geangu and Vuong (2020) found that 7-month-old infants look longer to fearful and angry bodies in comparison to happy bodies. Additionally, they look more to the upper body of fearful expressions compared to other emotional expressions. To our knowledge, no studies have examined whether the gender of the actors in the presented stimulus images impacts fixation to parts of emotional body expressions. The present study's goal was to examine the potential effect of the gender of the actors in the stimulus images on the looking behaviors of 6.5-month-old infants. Methods: Thirty-one 6.5-month-old infants were shown full body, black and white images of two female and two male actors portraying happy, angry, fearful, and sad expressions from the BEAST stimulus set (De Gelder & Van Den Stock, 2011). The faces of the actors were blurred. Each participant completed eight 8 second trials, viewing each emotional expression for the same actor twice. Infant visual fixations and looking times were recorded using a Tobii Tx300 eye-tracker. The dependent measure was the proportion fixation duration to three different AOIs: head, upper body (torso, arms, hands), and lower body (hips, legs, feet). Ten infants were excluded from analyses as they did not look at the images for at least 2 seconds. Results/Conclusion: A repeated-measure analysis of variance (RM ANOVA) with AOI (head, upper body, lower body) and expression (anger, fear, happy, sad) as within subject factors and stimuli gender (male, female) as a between-subject factor was conducted on infants’ proportion looking time. There was a main effect of AOI, F(2, 38) = 25.010, p < .001). Pairwise comparisons revealed significant differences in looking time between head and upper body AOIs (p < .001), head and lower body (p = .05), and upper and lower body (p < .001). All other main effects and interactions were not statistically significant (all p’s > .143). However, there were no significant differences found across emotion (F(3, 57) = 1.881, p = .143). In summary, this study failed to replicate the findings of Geangu and Vuong (2020) that infants visually explore the body regions of emotional expressions differently depending on emotion condition. Additionally, no significant effects by gender of the stimulus image were found. One possible reason for the differences found in this study is the stimulus presentation time, as Geangu and Vuong (2020) presented each stimulus for only 4 seconds each. Additionally, the smaller sample size in this study (N = 21) may have been insufficient to detect any effects of emotional expression and gender.