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Developmental Psychology Commons

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University of Massachusetts Amherst

Infant

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Full-Text Articles in Developmental Psychology

Infants' & Toddlers' Social Evaluations Of Trustworthy And Untrustworthy Faces, Ashley Lyons Jul 2016

Infants' & Toddlers' Social Evaluations Of Trustworthy And Untrustworthy Faces, Ashley Lyons

Doctoral Dissertations

Our understanding of the social world is highly influenced by the fast and automatic evaluations we make about others based on their facial appearance. The goal of the current studies is to explore the developmental origins of the particular face-trait evaluation of ‘trustworthiness.’ Experiment 1 tested whether 10-month-old infants differentiate between faces that adults rate as trustworthy and untrustworthy, and if they have a preference for one over the other in a crawling task. Experiment 2 tested whether 10-month-olds have implicit expectations about the social behavior of characters with trustworthy of untrustworthy faces in a looking-time task that presents infants …


Predicting Social Behavior By Sound & Surface Appearance In Infancy, Ashley Lyons Jan 2014

Predicting Social Behavior By Sound & Surface Appearance In Infancy, Ashley Lyons

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Our naïve theory of social behavior assumes that the positive and negative actions of others are caused by some underlying social disposition. Furthermore, adults automatically infer such traits in advance based upon whatever observable, even superficial, properties are available (e.g., how someone looks or sounds). The goal of the current study is to explore the developmental origins of this bias. We tested whether 12-month-old infants automatically infer a character’s social disposition (i.e., whether they ‘help’ or ‘hinder’ another character’s goal) based upon the superficial properties they display. Infants were habituated to two characters that possessed surface properties that were rated …


The Other-Race Effect And Its Influences On The Development Of Emotion Processing, Alexandra Monesson Jan 2009

The Other-Race Effect And Its Influences On The Development Of Emotion Processing, Alexandra Monesson

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

The theory of perceptual narrowing posits that the ability to make perceptual discriminations is very broad early in development and subsequently becomes more specific with perceptual experience (Scott, Pascalis, & Nelson, 2007). This leads to the formation of biases (Pascalis et al., 2002; 2005; Kelly et al., 2007), including the other-race effect (ORE). Behavioral and electrophysiological measures are used to show that by 9-months-of-age, infants exhibit a decline in ability to distinguish between two faces from another race compared to two faces from within their own race. Significant differences in the P400 component revealed a dampening of response to other-race …