Joseph J. Campos

Maternal emotional signaling: Its effect on the visual cliff behavior of 1-year-olds.

Facial expressions of emotion are not merely responses indicative of internal states, they are also stimulus patterns that regulate the behavior of others. A series of four studies indicate that, by 12 months of age, human infants seek out and use such facial expressions to disambiguate situations. The deep side of a visual cliff was adjusted to a height that produced no clear avoidance and much referencing of the mother. If a mother posed joy or interest while her infant referenced, most infants crossed the deep side. If a mother posed fear or anger, very few infants crossed. If a mother posed sadness, an intermediate number crossed. These findings are not interpretable as a discrepancy reaction to an odd pose: in the absence of any depth whatsoever, few infants referenced the mother and those who did while the mother was posing fear hesitated but crossed nonetheless. The latter finding suggests that facial expressions regulate behavior most clearly in contexts of uncertainty.

Travel broadens the mind.

The onset of locomotion heralds one of the major life transitions in early development and involves a pervasive set of changes in perception, spatial cognition, and social and emotional development. Through a synthesis of published and hitherto unpublished findings, gathered from a number of converging research designs and methods, this article provides a comprehensive review and reanalysis of the consequences of self-produced locomotor experience. Specifically, we focus on the role of locomotor experience in changes in social and emotional development, referential gestural communication, wariness of heights, the perception of self-motion, distance perception, spatial search, and spatial coding strategies. Our analysis reveals new insights into the specific processes by which locomotor experience brings about psychological changes. We elaborate these processes and provide new predictions about previously unsuspected links between locomotor experience and psychological function. The research we describe is relevant to our broad understanding of the developmental process, particularly as it pertains to developmental transitions. Although acknowledging the role of genetically mediated developmental changes, our viewpoint is a transactional one in which a single acquisition, in this case the onset of locomotion, sets in motion a family of experiences and processes that in turn mobilize both broad-based and context-specific psychological reorganizations. We conclude that, in infancy, the onset of locomotor experience brings about widespread consequences, and after infancy, can be responsible for an enduring role in development by maintaining and updating existing skills.

Toward a Theory of Infant Temperament

Why do we have a chapter on temperament in a volume primarily devoted to the concepts of attachment and affiliation? Years ago, such a chapter would have been unthinkable because attachment and temperament appeared to refer to different phenomena. Classic theories of mother-infant relations such as those of Spitz (1965) and Bowlby (1951) leaned in the direction of a “tabula rasa” model of the human infant by proposing that emotional and drive-regulating experiences provided by the mother were crucial for the formation and maintenance of ego functions. The individual differences these theorists were interested in were those resulting from successes and failures of maternal interaction, although on occasion they did invoke genetic and constitutional factors to account for unusual tolerances or susceptibilities to the ill effects of maternal separation. Individual differences in temperament, then, were relegated to a shorthand description of the susceptibility of the “tabula rasa” to experience—how hard or soft the tablet was, so to speak. Little speculation took place about how such differences in the infant could be assessed or whether they played a role in attachment.

Temperament, Emotion, and Cognition at Fourteen Months: The MacArthur Longitudinal Twin Study

200 pairs of twins were assessed at 14 months of age in the laboratory and home. Measures were obtained of temperament, emotion, and cognition/language. Comparisons between identical and fraternal twin correlations suggest that individual differences are due in part to heritable influences. For temperament, genetic influence was significant for behavioral observations of inhibition to the unfamiliar, tester ratings of activity, and parental ratings of temperament. For emotion, significant genetic influence was found for empathy and parental ratings of negative emotion. The estimate of heritability for parental report of expression of negative emotions was relatively high, whereas that for expression of positive emotions was low, a finding consistent with previous research. For cognition and language, genetic influence was significant for behavioral indices of spatial memory, categorization, and word comprehension. Shared rearing environment appears influential for parental reports of language and for positive emotions, but not for other measures of emotion or for temperament.

Infant Temperament, Mother's Mode of Interaction, and Attachment in Japan: An Interim Report.

The objective of our research is to investigate the possible relationships among several variables: the infants temperamental disposition, the mothers mode of interaction, and the quality of the subsequent motherinfant attachment. Our ultimate objective is to understand how processes in early infancy lay the basis for important individual differences in both personality and cognitive style in later childhood (Azuma, Kashiwagi, & Hess, 1981; Miyake, Tajima, & Usui, 1980). Specifically, our research concerns the relationship between the infants temperamental characteristics and the attachment to his or her mother; the

Early Experience and Emotional Development: The Emergence of Wariness of Heights

Because of its biological adaptive value, wariness of heights is widely believed to be innate or under maturational control. In this report, we present evidence contrary to this hypothesis, and show the importance of locomotor experience for emotional development. Four studies bearing on this conclusion have shown that (1) when age is held constant, locomotor experience accounts for wariness of heights; (2) “artificial” experience locomoting in a walker generates evidence of wariness of heights; (3) an orthopedically handicapped infant tested longitudinally did not show wariness of heights so long as he had no locomotor experience; and (4) regardless of the age when infants begin to crawl, it is the duration of locomotor experience and not age that predicts avoidance of heights. These findings suggest that when infants begin to crawl, experiences generated by locomotion make possible the development of wariness of heights.

Facial patterning and infant emotional expression: happiness, surprise, and fear.

Although recent studies have convincingly demonstrated that emotional expressions can be judged reliably from actor-posed facial displays, there exists little evidence that facial expressions in lifelike settings are similar to actor-posed displays, are reliable across situations designed to elicit the same emotion, or provide sufficient information to mediate consistent emotion judgments by raters. The present study therefore investigated these issues as they related to the emotions of happiness, surprise, and fear. 27 infants between 10 and 12 months of age (when emotion masking is not likely to confound results) were tested in 2 situations designed to elicit hapiness (peek-a-boo game and a collapsing toy), 2 to elicit surprise (a toy-switch and a vanishing-object task), and 2 to elicit fear (the visual cliff and the approach of a stranger. Dependent variables included changes in 28 facial response components taken from previous work using actor poses, as well as judgments of the presence of 6 discrete emotions. In addition, instrumental behaviors were used to verify with other than facial expression responses whether the predicted emotion was elicited. In contrast to previous conclusions on the subject, we found that judges were able to make all facial expression judgments reliably, even in the absence of contextual information. Support was also obtained for at least some degree of specificity of facial component response patterns, especially for happiness and surprise. Emotion judgments by raters were found to be a function of the presence of discrete facial components predicted to be linked to those emotions. Finally, almost all situations elicited blends, rather than discrete emotions.

Production of Emotional Facial Expressions in European American, Japanese, and Chinese Infants.

European American, Japanese, and Chinese 11-month-olds participated in emotion-inducing laboratory procedures. Facial responses were scored with BabyFACS, an anatomically based coding system. Overall, Chinese infants were less expressive than European American and Japanese infants. On measures of smiling and crying, Chinese infants scored lower than European American infants, whereas Japanese infants were similar to the European American infants or fell between the two other groups. Results suggest that differences in expressivity between European American and Chinese infants are more robust than those between European American and Japanese infants and that Chinese and Japanese infants can differ significantly. Cross-cultural differences were also found for some specific brow, cheek, and midface facial actions (e.g., brows lowered). These are discussed in terms of current controversies about infant affective facial expressions.

Reconceptualizing Emotion Regulation

Emotion regulation is one of the major foci of study in the fields of emotion and emotional development. This article proposes that to properly study emotion regulation, one must consider not only an intrapersonal view of emotion, but a relational one as well. Defining properties of intrapersonal and relational approaches are spelled out, and implications drawn for how emotion regulation is conceptualized, how studies are designed, how findings are interpreted, and how generalizations are drawn. Most research to date has been conducted from an intrapersonal perspective, and the shortcomings of this approach for understanding emotion regulation are highlighted. The article emphasizes major conceptual and methodological steps required for a fuller description of the process of emotion regulation.

The partial-lag design: A method for controlling spontaneous regression in the infant-control habituation paradigm*

The problem of spontaneous regression in the infant control procedure is discussed and empirical evidence demonstrating that it contributes significantly to postcriterion looking scores is presented. Previous approaches to controlling spontaneous regression are reviewed and are found unsatisfactory and/or inefficient. A new approach utilizing a partial-lag design is presented as an alternative. In contrast to previous approaches, this method successfully controls spontaneous regression without requiring a group of babies exclusively for control purposes.