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A recent article by Popular Science  reports on a new study from Psychology professor Ross Flom and colleagues that found babies are able to read each other’s emotional expressions as early as 5 months old.  The study which was published in Infancy journal comes right after similar research  published by Flom on infants’ ability to understand the moods of dogs, monkeys and classical music .

Flom explains that while babies are unable to communicate through language they do learn how to communicate through affect, or emotion.  This implies that not only can they read emotional expressions of their infant peers, but they can perceive and associate changes in those expressions as well.  Flom points out, “… it is not surprising that in early development, infants learn to discriminate changes in affect.”   This change in affect is where babies are able to “read” each other while most adults are left scratching their heads.

The study, held at Brigham Young University which was co-authored by Professor Lorraine Bahrick  and  graduate student Mariana Vaillant-Molina from Florida International University, looked at 40 babies ranging from 3.5 to 5 months old.

The study placed baby participants in front of two monitors.  One displayed a video of a happy baby and the other displayed a video of an unhappy baby.  While the babies were placed in front of the monitors, researchers played audio from a third baby.  The audio was either of a happy, laughing baby or of a sad, crying baby.

Researchers noticed that when the audio reflected happy baby noises the infants focused on the happy baby video and when the audio was sad they looked more to the sad video.

Past studies found that babies (not infants) are able to perceive facial expressions of emotion in familiar adults at 6 months and all other adults by 7 months.  However, this study takes it a step further documenting that infants as young as 5 months (but not as young as 3.5 months) have the capability to perceive and recognize emotional expressions in other infants

Flom substantiates, “These findings add to our understanding of early infant development by reiterating the fact that babies are highly sensitive to and comprehend some level of emotion.” Flom goes on to say, “Babies learn more in their first 2 1/2 years of life than they do the rest of their lifespan, making it critical to examine how and what young infants learn and how this helps them learn other things.”

Flom would like to take his recent findings a step further by testing whether infants younger than 5 months are able to demonstrate this same level of perception by watching and hearing clips of themselves.

What do you think? Will babies be able to read emotion even earlier if it’s their own?

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A study published in PLOS ONE, earlier this week, says that fetuses actually practice their facial expression while in utero.

MedicalXpress noted that the study, which was an eight year project applied Facs, a facial action coding system, used to study adult facial expressions, to the unborn fetuses throughout their development.

The findings were that unborn babies practice making expressions such as crying and smiling as well as pain-like mannerisms, identified by simultaneously furrowing the brow, wrinkling the nose and raising the lip while still in the womb.

The facial images were taken from 4D scans of healthy fetuses.  It was noted that smiling happens earlier on in the pregnancy and more complex expressions such as pain which involves multiple muscles evolve around 36 weeks.

Lead Researcher and senior lecturer in developmental psychology at Durham University, Dr Nadja Reissland, noted, “At the moment there is no link between these expressions and emotions”.

However, researchers do believe that rehearsing these facial expressions in utero allows a new born baby to be able to communicate pain or distress to their parents as soon as they are born, which is a necessary life skill.

To find out more on the study read the entire article.