An infant control habituation-recovery procedure was used to study 3-month-old infants' discrimination of sad, happy, and surprise facial expressions. (Author/JMB)

Examined seven-month-old infants' perceptions of happy and fearful facial expressions. Infants could generalize discrimination of expressions across male and female faces if first familiarized with happy faces. Infants tended to look longer at fear faces than at happy faces. Preferential responding was not specific to any individual face.…

This study with 50 adults with mental retardation, found that performance on the Facial Discrimination Task (Emotional and Age Tasks) was significantly correlated to the Cognitive Assessment System total score. Hierarchical regression analyses produced results suggesting that cognitive processes are involved in processing facial stimuli in a…

Two experiments tested whether newborns could discriminate their own and another newborn's cry. Results indicated that awake newborns expressed facial distress more frequently and longer to another newborn's cry than to their own. Sucking decreased significantly between pretest phase and first minute of another infant's cry. Asleep infants'…

This study examined whether 49 adults with mild or moderate mental retardation could perform reliably enough on the Penn Facial Discrimination Task to make this a useful research measure for evaluating visual-receptive processing. Results found subjects generally performed well above chance level, that retest reliability was reasonably high, and…

Infants were tested for recognition and discrimination of expressions. Ten-month olds familiar with a mix of happy and surprised expressions demonstrated generalized discrimination of positive affect. Only after seven months does dependence on the presence of expression-specific features for affect recognition and discrimination diminish. (BC)

Three experiments compared infants' reactions to videos of normally responsive women varying in eye contact. Found that, relative to frontal faces, three-month olds smiled less at images averting head and eye (H&I), head alone (H), and closing eyes (ECL) but not at averting eyes (E). Five-month-olds smiled less at H&I, E, and ECL but not…

An attempt was made to document the beginning of children's ability to make cognitive-emotional discriminations between skill-dependent outcomes and chance-dependent outcomes of performance on tasks. Children between the ages of 2 and 5 years were administered structurally similar achievement games and effect games. It was thought that as soon as…

Two experiments assessed recognition of emotion among physically abused and neglected preschoolers. Results showed that neglected children had more difficulty discriminating emotional expressions that control or abused children. Abused children displayed response bias for angry facial expressions. Control children viewed discrete emotions as…