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when presented with happy speech than when presented with sad, angry, and neutral speech, and they look more at happy than neutral faces (Mastropieri & Turkewitz, 1999; Rigato et al., 2011). And with age, infants’ skill at discriminat- ing among emotions improves. A review of studies on infants’ emotion under- standing showed that 4- and 5-month-olds distinguish happy from negative facial expressions such as anger; and by around 7 months of age, infants rec- ognize similarities among people’s emotions, as seen in their categorization of happy faces together and angry faces together (e.g., Ruba & Repacholi, 2019). Young infants likewise respond to gradations in the intensity of emotion expressions, such as by distinguishing between smiles that are subtle versus full-blown. In a clever habituation-novelty preference study (see Chapters 4 and 5) researchers examined 3-month-old infants’ perceptions of smiling in relation to their interactions with mothers at home (Kuchuk, Vibbert, & Bornstein, 1986). Infants were shown a series of pictures of a woman smiling, ranging from a sub- tle upturn of the lips to a full-blown smile with teeth exposed. Infants looked longer to a smile of a different intensity after being habituated to a slightly larger or smaller smile. Moreover, infants’ experience with smiles aided their discrimination: Infants with mothers who more frequently encouraged their infants to look at them as they smiled were better able to distinguish among the different smile gradients. Thus, infants’ experiences looking at the smiling face of their mothers supported their ability to distinguish among smiles. Infants are also able to connect emotional information in the face to infor- mation in the voice. Matching studies , which ask whether infants are able to “match” the emotional content of stimuli presented in different modalities such as face and voice, reveal this ability. In such studies, researchers present infants with side-by-side displays of two facial expressions, such as happy and sad, along with an audio recording of a voice that matches one of the facial expres- sions. If infants look longer to the facial expression that matches the voice, it suggests that they have connected the emotions across visual and auditory channels. By 5 months of age infants look longer to a positive facial expression when hearing a happy voice than when hearing an angry voice and can even match the emotions in faces to the emotions in vocalizations of other babies (Vaillant-Molina, Bahrick, & Flom, 2013) ( FIGURE 7.9 ). Additionally, infants match emotions in facial expressions and voices at even younger ages when

matching studies  Studies that assess whether infants are able to match the emotional content of stimuli presented in different modali- ties, such as face and voice

Negative expressed by their vocalizations.  Researchers presented 5-month-old infants with videos of infants displaying negative and positive expressions. The videos were accompanied by positive or negative infant vocal expressions. Infants “matched” the vocal expressions to their congruent facial expressions by looking more to the face that matched the affect that they heard. PROPERTY OF OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Pair 1 Pair 2 Positive From M. Vaillant-Molina. 2013. Infancy 18: E97–E111 FIGURE 7.9  Infants match emotions in the faces of other infants to the emotions