In the first weeks and months of life infants seem capable of expressing ‘basic’ emotions including fear, anger, sadnessm happiness and surprise. Toward the end of the first year the typical infant expresses emotions more readily, more frequently, and more distinctly. The basic emotions that can be directly inferred from facial expressions are:
At what ages do different emotions first emerge?
Newborns:
At 2 months there is the joy face: social smiles (Malatesta et al 1989) and joy when a skill is mastered (Lewis, Alessandri and Sullivan, 1990). There is controversy about anger, fear and sadness: Izard and Malatesta (1987) using one coding system observed all 3 states in 3 month old children but Oyster et al (1992), using a different system, saw only undifferentiated distress in the first year.
Some researchers argue that evidence for specific emotions in babies only counts if an appropriate situation leads to the relevant emotion face and emotion behaviour. Hiatt, Campos and Emde (1979) studied 1-12 month old infants, specifically their expressions and behaviours in specific situations. They concluded that 1 year olds show the appropriate facial expressions and appropriate behaviours in response to happiness, fear and surprise situations.
| Situation | Most commonly judged face | Predicted behaviour |
| Peek-a-boo | Happy | Try to restart game (~100%) |
| Visual cliff | Fear | Refuse to cross (~100%) |
| Vanishing object | Suprise | Search for toy (50%) |
These appear at the end of the second year when a sense of self emerges. See Lewis, Sullivan, Stanger and Weiss (1989) for how embarrassment is experienced when a sense of self has emerged.
Summary of when emotions first emerge
| Age | Emotion |
| 0 | Positive and negative states |
| 6 months | Joy, fear, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise all differentiated |
| 18 months | Cognitive capacity of self-awareness permits embarrassment and envy to emerge |
| 30 months | Cognitive capacity of evaluating the self against a social standard permits pride, shame and guilt to emerge |
Judy Dunn (1988)
Dunn (1988) showed that social understanding follows from emotionally charged encounters with siblings and parents and family talk about emotions. Her experiment was a longitudinal study of 52 second-born children in home settings aged 14-36 months looking at emotion shown by children in mother-child conflicts.
Three kinds of conflict were distinguished
The emotion shown by children in such conflicts at 18 months was compared with how much reasoning children use in these disputes at 36 months. The conclusion was that 36 month old children were more likely to reason (as opposed to protest) in those conflicts where they had previously expressed anger and distress.
Paul Harris (1989)
According to Harris (1989) social understanding and understanding others emotions follows from the development of certain cognitive abilities. These are
Bischof-Kohler, D. (1988). Uber der Zusammenhang von Empathie und der Fahigkeit, sich im Spiegel zu erkennen. Schweizerische Zeitschrift fur Psychologie 47:147-159.
Dunn, J. (1988). The beginnings of social understanding. Blackwell
Ganchrow, J. R., Steiner, J. E. & Daher, M. Neonatal facial expressions in response to different qualities and intensities of gustatory stimuli. Infant Behavior and Development 6, 189-200 (1983)
Hiatt, S. W., Campos, J. J., & Emde, R. N. (1979). Facial patterning and infant emotional expression: Happiness, surprise, and fear. Child Development, 50, 1020–1035.
Izard, C. E., & Malatesta, C. Z. (1987). Perspectives on emotional development I: Differential emotions theory of early emotional development. In J. D. Osofsky (Ed). Handbook of infant development. New York: Wiley Interscience.
Lewis, M., Sullivan, M. W., Stanger, C., & Weiss, M. (1989). Self development and self-conscious emotions. Child Development, 60, 146-156.