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Attachment   267

Culture and the Perceptions of Emotions Do cultural differences in infants’ experiences affect infants’ perceptions of emotions in others? Although researchers have not addressed this question with infants, studies with adults indicate both similarities and differences in adults’ perceptions of emotional expressions across cultural communities. Several decades ago, Paul Ekman (1971) showed that adults from differ- ent countries around the world identified facial expressions similarly. People everywhere agree that a broad smile indicates happiness, and similarly dis- cern when a person is angry, sad, and so forth. Yet, researchers have since documented subtle cultural differences in adults’ interpretation of emotions in faces. For example, adults fromWestern nations and adults from East Asia differ in their categorization of the six basic emotions—happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sadness. Adults from East Asia have a harder time distinguishing among these emotions in faces than do adults from Western nations, and they primarily base their ratings of emotion intensity on the eyes, whereas adults fromWestern nations tend to attend to other parts of the face such as the mouth (Jack et al., 2012). Why might this be? One possibility is that East Asians value the ability of individuals to be restrained in their emotional expressions. Emotional restraint might result in fewer visible cues to happiness, for example. And, because the eyes are under less voluntary control than the mouth, even if restraint of emotions occurs in the mouth, the brows continue to reveal what someone is feeling. Through years of experience interacting with people who maintain gener- ally subdued faces, infants and children may learn to scan subtly different cues in the face to decipher how others are feeling. If so, infants and chil- dren from East Asia might come to learn that the eyes hold cues to emotions, whereas infants and children from Western nations might come to learn that the mouth is most telling. CHECK YOUR UNDERSTANDING 7.14 1. How do cultural values and expectations affect emotional development? Give an example. ✓ ■  Social Development Infants are social beings. Except in rare instances of neglect, such as the Romanian orphanage example at the start of the chapter (where infants did not have regular caregivers with whom to form attachments), all infants, regardless of where they live or with whom they interact, form attachments to the people who care for them. In fact, social development begins at birth, if not before. Newborns respond to faces, voices, touch, and smell by orienting their bodies and eyes to those around them, and by moving their bodies in socially responsive ways. Infants’ social behaviors in turn elicit attention and nurturance from family members that then foster attachment in infants. In the sections following, you will learn about infants’ developing attachments to their primary caregivers, their social relation- ships with peers, and how the early seeds of morality and prosocial behaviors emerge at this important time in development. Attachment Attachment refers to the affectionate bonds that infants develop toward the important people in their lives and their reliance on loved ones for comfort and protection. Infants display their attachment by following caregivers around, visually tracking caregivers’ whereabouts, and sometimes clinging

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attachment  The affectionate bonds that infants develop toward the im- portant people in their lives and their reliance on loved ones for comfort and protection UNIVERSITY PRESS