Early Childhood Emotions Research

Emotions are an essential form of communication in early childhood. Children quickly learn a wide range of emotions and when to express certain emotions to communicate with their caregivers and also learn how to discriminate between different emotions. A study done by Paul Ekman et al., showed that infants are able to make almost all the same muscle movements used by adults to express emotions (7). There are some emotions referred to as basic emotions. Basic emotions are characterized by typical facial expressions, a physiological change, and an accompanying behaviour (8). Some examples of basic emotions include happiness, fear, anger, joy, fear, sadness, surprise, disgust, and distress. Different basic emotions emerge at different moments
Researchers have shown that the ability to discriminate happy, sad, and surprise expressions is actually possible 36 hours after birth (1). This ability to discriminate between different emotions continues to develop as the infant progresses through infancy. Some studies have also shown that 3 month old infants are capable of discriminating smiling faces from frowning faces, and happy faces from surprising faces (3). In the first 6 months of life, most studies have shown that infants progressively get better at discriminating between different expressions, with a better ability in regards to discrimination of positive expressions from other expressions (4). One hypothesis regarding this phenomenon is that early in infancy children first learn to distinguish emotions in which they are exposed to most frequently, which are usually positive emotions, and thus have less ability to detect emotions in which they have less exposure to such as negative emotions (5). Finally, once an infant reaches 7 months of age, studies show a remarkable change in emotional discrimination, because by this age infants are able to distinguish emotions in which they have less experiences with and are able to categorize different facial expressions