Facial Expressions Are A Means For Communication - amazonia.fiocruz.br

Opinion: Facial Expressions Are A Means For Communication

Facial Expressions Are A Means For Communication Video

Learning in the face of uncertainty

Vanessa LoBue does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. Faces and facial expressions have a special power over us as human beings. While friendly faces make us feel warm and fuzzy, those of our opponents evoke fear or even anger. So, when do we as kids learn to recognize faces and facial expressions? And what lessons can be learned by parents whose facial signals carry a massive amount of information for infants?

Newborns show Communjcation distinct preference for the faces of their mothers, only hours after they are born. Decades of research from many different labs suggest that faces are quite special for infants right from birth. To demonstrate this, researchers showed newborns who were only nine minutes old paddles that contained the image of a face or the image of a scrambled face. Researchers then moved the paddles along their line of sight.

Newborns followed the paddles with images of faces on them for longer than paddles with scrambled faces. And within a matter of days, they will learn to discriminate between different emotional facial expressions, like happy, sad and surprised faces.

Munchkin Press

This response here faces will continue to grow over time. By the time infants are five months old, they will learn to match the image of an emotional expression e. Some argue that infants have a biological predisposition to prefer faces right from birth. Others suggest that the massive amount of experience newborns get with faces right away is enough to promote rapid learning. They attempt to descend the slope only when their mothers offer an encouraging smile; they refuse when their mothers discourage them from going.

Similarly, toddlers avoid new toys when mothers pose a fearful facial expression toward them. But they happily approach new toys when mothers show a smiling face.

The importance of faces for children

This rapidly developing ability to identify different faces and facial expressions is of huge value for infants. And one-year-olds even behave differently around people with more attractive faces, smiling and playing more with attractive adults than with unattractive adults. Perhaps even more surprising is that infants prefer the faces of their own race by three months of age, and have trouble distinguishing between faces of other races by nine months.

But as they become experts at identifying the faces they see most often, they lose the ability to differentiate between faces that look different from the ones that are most familiar to them. In other words, they begin to have trouble deciding whether two faces of a different race are the same person, or two different people.]