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Problems in the Study of Infant Emotional Development

For this special section, I have selected a diverse set of articles, all dealing with infants and emotion in one way or another. In order to try and arrange these articles in some coherent way, I must turn back to a distinction I made in the 1980s (Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979; Lewis & Michalson, 1983) in which an emotion is broken down into its constituents. These distinctions have been made many times since (Frijda, 1986). This deconstruction of the term emotion will serve us well in placing these articles in this special section, and at the same time is likely to raise a set of problems which need consideration. The deconstruction of the term emotion into emotional expression, states, and experiences, including, if we will, emotion eliciting situations, allows us to proceed. Emotional expressions are surface, observable features including facial expression, body movement, and facial behavior. Unfortunately most studies have focused on facial expression taking only part of Darwin’s (1872) observation of emotional behavior. These studies have utilized Paul Ekman’s (1991) and Carroll Izard’s (1977) facial coding systems. In the developmental literature, as well as elsewhere, almost absent is the study of body posture, or even gestures, and very little has been done on vocal behavior. In fact, facial expression and body posture research are usually found in different journals, the latter under the rubric of nonverbal behavior. This is a pity since body posture or even vocal behavior can be communicated over longer distances than facial expression, thus allowing distant social decision-making prior to immediate contact. For example, when we need to decide if someone is smiling or showing an angry or fearful expression. Perhaps even more important is the question of the organization of these different features of expressive behavior. In an unpublished study, reported in Lewis and Michalson (1983), we found that infants exposed to a stranger responded differently in terms of the organization of features depending upon the particular context. So if a 15-month-old is free to roam when presented with a stranger, she moves behind her mother (movement away) but shows no wary or fearful face. Indeed, she is likely to peer out at the stranger and make eye contact once she moves away. The same child, when placed in a high chair, is likely to show wariness on her face and to turn her face away. Such observations suggest that facial expression and body movement may be coordinated or disengaged depending on the context; a wary face may not be necessary if the child can get away physically from the stranger but may be necessary if she cannot get away physically. Findings such as these suggest two important questions: (a) from a developmental perspective, how do the different expressive features of face, gestures, activity, and vocal behavior get organized? Thus we need to ask not only as Camras (2011) does, how do facial features get organized, but an even broader question, namely, how do all expressive features get organized? Perhaps a dynamic system approach can handle all of these features, not only the facial neuromusculature, but that remains to be seen. The second question has to do with the organizational processes once these features emerge: (b) what are the governing rules that connect and disconnect emotional expressions of facial, body gesture, and vocal behavior? Clearly the organizational principles for either question seem to need both learning as well as biological given perspectives like those action patterns suggested by Darwin, even though the idea of an attractor is seen as an alternative to the action patterns. Clear distinctions need to be made as to why an attractor in dynamic systems is not similar to innate action patterns. And moreover, what is the gain of using one versus the other? The second feature of emotion is emotional states. The discussion of what emotional states are has occupied our interest in emotion from the end of the 19th century to the present. The idea that emotional states are internal bodily behaviors including the central nervous system (CNS), autonomic nervous system (ANS), and hormonal systems has a long history