Linda A. Camras

DePaul University · Department of Psychology

There is surprisingly little empirical evidence supporting theoretical and anecdotal claims regarding the spontaneous production of prototypic facial expressions used in numerous emotion recognition studies. Proponents of innate prototypic expressions believe that this lack of evidence may be due to ethical restrictions against presenting powerful...

Carolyn Saarni's theory of emotional competence has made a central contribution by directing attention to some important functions of emotion in social interaction. Her work is permeated with examples of how emotions function within both successful and unsuccessful social interactions and relationships. An examination of her stated principles of em...

There is surprisingly little empirical evidence supporting theoretical and anecdotal claims regarding the spontaneous production of prototypic facial expressions used in numerous emotion recognition studies. Proponents of innate prototypic expressions believe that this lack of evidence may be due to ethical restrictions against presenting powerful...

Objective. This study examined whether mainland Chinese and U.S. American children’s interpretations of their parents’ coercive authority assertion and critical comparison and shaming moderate relations between their reports of parenting and adjustment. Design. Middle-school children from mainland China (n = 217) and the United States (n = 207) rat...

Emotion competence, particularly as manifested within social interaction (i.e., affective social competence) is an important contributor to children's optimal social and psychological functioning. In this article we highlight advances in understanding three processes involved in affective social competence: a) experiencing emotions, b) effectively...

Despite theoretical claims that emotions are primarily communicated through prototypic facial expressions, empirical evidence is surprisingly scarce. This study aimed to: (1) test whether children produced more components of a prototypic emotional facial expression during situations judged or self-reported to involve the corresponding emotion than...

Emotional communication regulates the behaviors of social partners. Research on individuals' responding to others' emotions typically compares responses to a single negative emotion compared with responses to a neutral or positive emotion. Furthermore, coding of such responses routinely measure surface level features of the behavior (e.g., approach...

Research on adult age differences in the interpretation of facial expressions has yet to examine evaluations of surprised faces, which signal that an unexpected and ambiguous event has occurred in the expresser’s environment. The present study examined whether older and younger adults differed in their interpretations of the affective valence of su...

In this study, we report findings on the role of preadoption adversity on long-term clinical-range problems in adopted Chinese girls. Four waves (2005, 2007, 2009 and 2011) of problem behavior data on 1,223 adopted Chinese girls (M = 4.86 years, SD = 2.82 in 2005) were collected from the adoptive mothers with the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). At...

Objectives: We studied postinstitutionalized adopted Chinese girls to determine whether those with different variants of the MAOA gene promoter region (MAOA-VNTR) differed in their internalizing and externalizing behavior problems and whether the MAOA genotype moderated the relation between preadoption adversity and current behavior problems. Met...

Eye gaze direction and expression intensity effects on emotion recognition in children with autism disorder and typically developing children were investigated. Children with autism disorder and typically developing children identified happy and angry expressions equally well. Children with autism disorder, however, were less accurate in identifyin...

Cultural differences in emotion responding have been widely observed and must be incorporated into any comprehensive theory of human emotion. Socialization within the family is an important conduit through which culture influences the development of emotion. In this chapter, we focus particularly on the central role that parents play in the sociali...

Our study tested the hypothesis that drastic social-cultural change has an impact on girls' pre-menarche pubertal development. We focused on a unique group of Chinese immigrants who migrated out of China in infancy through international adoption. Our sample included 298 Chinese girls who were 7.3-11.1 years in 2011 (Mean = 8.8, SD = 0.9) and were a...

Emotion theories based on research with adults must be able to accommodate developmental data if they are to be deemed satisfactory accounts of human emotion. Inspired in part by theory and research on adult emotion, developmentalists have investigated emotion-related processes including affect elicitation, internal and overtly observable emotion r...

Objective. The researchers in this study investigated whether Chinese and American children's interpretations of parents' coercive authority assertion moderate relations between their self-reported parenting and adjustment. Associations between child adjustment and parents' shaming and critically comparing children to their peers were also investig...

Parental sensitivity, a crucial element of attachment theory, refers to the ability to correctly interpret and respond appropriately to infants' signals. The question of whether infants' emotional expressions communicate discrete negative emotions has been widely debated in the literature on infant emotional development, but it has rarely been disc...

This study seeks to extend previous research on family stress, parenting, and child adjustment to families with adopted Chinese children. In doing so, we also seek to strengthen inferences regarding the experiential underpinnings of previously obtained relationships among these variables by determining if they also occur in families where parents a...

This study examines adopted Chinese girls' social skills at home and in school as well as the effect of pre-adoption adversity on these skills. Parent ratings of 869 girls and teacher ratings of 611 of the 869 girls were obtained using the Social Skills Rating System for parent (SSRS-P) and teacher (SSRS-T) respectively. The girls were adopted on a...

In recent decades, considerable progress has been made in our understanding of emotional development. Yet no single current theory can fully encompass all of the empirical findings. Herein I propose that aspects of several theoretical approaches can be incorporated into a novel view that is informed by the dynamical systems perspective.

The current study evaluated the quality of facial and vocal emotional expressions in abusive and non-abusive mothers, and assessed whether mothers' emotional expression quality was related to their children's cognitive processing of emotion and behavioural problems. Relative to non-abusive mothers, abusive mothers produced less prototypical angry f...

Copyright - © SAGE Publications and The International Society for Research on Emotion 2010, Date revised - 20100802, Number of references - 6, Last updated - 2012-09-10, DOI - PSIN-2010-14581-022; 2010-14581-022; 1754-0739; 1754-0747, SubjectsTermNotLitGenreText - Emotional Responses, Barrett, Karen Caplovitz; Campos, Joseph J. Perspectives on emot...

Coan’s article persuasively argues for an emergent variable model of emotion. This commentary highlights one version of such an approach that has been adopted by some developmental researchers, the dynamical systems perspective.

In this article, we review empirical evidence regarding the relationship between facial expression and emotion during infancy. We focus on differential emotions theory's view of this relationship because of its theoretical and methodological prominence. We conclude that current evidence fails to support its proposal regarding a set of pre-specified...

In the target article, we reviewed empirical evidence regarding the relationship between facial expressions and emotion in infancy. In our response to commentators, we make three main points. First, we concur with Hertenstein that the field has thus far relied too heavily on deductive reasoning, and suggest that future research strike a balance bet...

This study compared Mainland Chinese, Chinese American and European American mothers' self-reported emotional expression within the family. Mothers of 3-year-old European American ( n = 40), Chinese American (n = 39) and Mainland Chinese (n = 36) children (n = 20 girls per group) completed the Self-Expressiveness in the Family Questionnaire (SEFQ),...

This study examined relationships among parents' physiological regulation, their emotion socialization behaviors, and their children's emotion knowledge. Parents' resting cardiac vagal tone was measured, and parents provided information regarding their socialization behaviors and family emotional expressiveness. Their 4- or 5-year-old children (N=4...

One important emotion theory currently postulates an innate tie between specific infant facial expressions and a set of discrete basic emotions. The arguments and evidence relevant to this assertion are reviewed. New data are presented from a naturalistic study of one infant's early expressive development and a judgement study of infant facial, voc...

The psychological revolution that follows the onset of independent locomotion in the latter half of the infant's first year provides one of the best illustrations of the intimate connection between action and psychological processes. In this paper, we document some of the dramatic changes in perception-action coupling, spatial cognition, memory, an...

Do infants show distinct negative facial expressions for different negative emotions? To address this question, European American, Chinese, and Japanese 11-month-olds were videotaped during procedures designed to elicit mild anger or frustration and fear. Facial behavior was coded using Baby FACS, an anatomically based scoring system. Infants' nonf...

Post-institutionalized Chinese and Eastern European children participated in two emotion understanding tasks. In one task, children selected facial expressions corresponding to four emotion labels (happy, sad, angry, scared). The second task required children to match facial expressions to stories describing situations for these emotions. While bot...

This investigation extends previous research documenting differences in Chinese and European American infants' facial expressivity. Chinese girls adopted by European American families, nonadopted Mainland Chinese girls, nonadopted Chinese American girls, and nonadopted European American girls responded to emotionally evocative slides and an odor st...

Within the last 20 years, transitions in the conceptualization of emotion and its development have given rise to calls for an explanatory framework that captures emotional development in all its organizational complexity and variability. Recent attempts have been made to couch emotional development in terms of a dynamical systems approach through u...

The hypothesis investigated by Bennett, Bendersky, and Lewis (2002) has 2 components. The first concerns relations between events and emotions, and the second concerns relations between emotions and facial expressions. These components should be conceptually distinguished, independently investigated, and separately evaluated.

This paper presents a unitary approach to emotion and emotion regulation, building on the excellent points in the lead article by Cole, Martin, and Dennis (this issue), as well as the fine commentaries that follow it. It begins by stressing how, in the real world, the processes underlying emotion and emotion regulation appear to be largely one and...

Charles Darwin was among the first to recognize the important contribution that infant studies could make to our understanding of human emotional expression. Noting that infants come to exhibit many emotions, he also observed that at first their repertoire of expression is highly restricted. Today, considerable controversy exists regarding the ques...

Eleven-month-old European-American, Japanese, and Chinese infants (ns = 23, 21, and 15, respectively) were videotaped during baseline and stimulus episodes of a covert toy-switch procedure. Infants looked longer at the object during the expectancy-violating event (stimulus episode) but did not produce more surprise-related facial expressions. Ameri...

European American, Japanese, and Chinese 11-month-olds participated in emotion-inducing laboratory procedures. Facial responses were scored with BabyFACS, an anatomically based coding system. Overall, Chinese infants were less expressive than European American and Japanese infants. On measures of smiling and crying, Chinese infants scored lower tha...

Facial expressions convey a vast amount of information, but only recently have investigators begun to explore the precise details of what expressions are telling us about internal states, social behavior, and psychopathology. The Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which is a tool for comprehensively measuring facial expressions, plays a central ro...

We investigated American, Japanese, and Chinese infants' responses to laboratory procedures designed to evoke the emotions of anger/frustration, fear, and surprise. To measure infants' emotional response, we asked judges to rate each infant's emotional response after viewing edited videotapes of our procedures on which the babies' facial expression...

This study found that the facial action of moderately or widely opening the mouth is accompanied by brow raising in infnats, thus producing surprise expressions in non-surprise situations. Infants (age = 5 months and 7 months) were videotaped as they were presented with toys that they often grasped and brought to their mouths. Episodes of mouth ope...

Adult judges were presented with videotape segments showing an infant displaying facial configurations hypothesized to express discomfort/pain, anger, or sadness according to differential emotions theory (Izard, Dougherty, & Hembree, 1983). The segments also included the infant''s nonfacial behavior and aspects of the situational context. Judges ra...

Maltreated and nonmaltreated children (ages 3-7 years) were paired for brief play sessions involving a single desirable object. Facial, verbal, and physical actions used while negotiating access to the object were examined. Results showed that the maltreated-nonmaltreated pairs were able to engage in a negotiation process resulting in approximately...

To make the point that infant emotions are more dynamic than suggested by Differential Emotions Theory, which maintains that infants show the same prototypical facial expressions for emotions as adults do, this paper explores two questions: (1) when infants experience an emotion, do they always show the corresponding prototypical facial expression?...

Five- and 12-mo-old Japanese and American infants participated in a nonpainful arm restraint procedure. Facial responses were scored with an anatomically based coding system (Baby FACS, an adaptation for infants of the Facial Action Coding System [FACS; P. Ekman and W. Friesen, 1978]). Nonfacial body activity (struggling) and negative vocalizations...

Two opposing facial actions, raised and knit (contracted) brows, have been considered expressions of the unitary emotion of interest. We examined differential relationships between these brow actions and accompanying head, eye, arm, and other facial movements in 5- and 7-month-old infants who were videotaped as toys were presented above or below ey...

Facial expressions of 18 female day care workers were observed during their natural interactions at their day care centers. Subsequently, they participated twice in a social referencing procedure, once with each of two infants for whom they cared (M age = 14.6 months, SD = 2.72). The procedure involved presentation of two ambiguous toys and caretak...

20 maltreated and 20 nonmaltreated children (ages = 3–7 years) and their mothers were observed during a laboratory play session and 7 home observation visits. Ss' facial behavior was video recorded in the lab and coded live by observers in the home. Children also participated in an emotional-expression recognition task. Data analysis showed that bo...

Eight-year-old children and adult female college students were asked to describe situations in which each of six emotions would be felt (production task) and to judge which emotion would be felt in situations described by other subjects (judgment task). In addition, mothers of the child subjects were asked to judge descriptions generated by their o...

We created 54 brief vignettes that covered six emotion categories: happy, sad, angry, surprised, disgusted, and afraid. The vignettes described emotion- eliciting situations and were validated by administration of them to 5- and 6-year-olds who were asked to pick one of three emotion labels provided that would best match the feeling of the characte...

Twenty abused and 20 nonabused pairs of children (3 to 7 years of age) and their mothers participated in a facial expression posing task and a facial expression recognition task. The expressions produced by subjects were judged on emotion content by naive raters and were coded using Friesen and Ekman's (1984) Emotion Facial Action Coding System (EM...

Preschool, kindergarten, first and second-grade children were told twelve stories describing emotion-inducing events. After each story the subjects were presented either with three emotion labels (e.g., happy, sad, surprised) or with facial expressions of three emotions. Subjects were asked to choose the label or expression appropriate for the stor...

60 1st graders and 60 undergraduates were presented with brief stories and asked to supply the verbal statement (directive) that would be used by the story character. Half the stories described situations in which imperative statements were expected to be used, and half described situations in which nonimperatives (indirect directives) were expecte...

The investigation of affect communication constitutes an ideal domain in which to study the interaction of biological and social factors in the genesis of complex human behavior. Facial expressions of emotion are among the few socially relevant actions for which strong evidence exists to support claims of species specificity. Research conducted in...

Same-sexed pairs of children (N = 144) were videotaped during brief play sessions involving a limited but desirable resource. Pairs varied in sex, age (preschool, kindergarten, second grade), friendship (friends vs nonfriends), and perceived dominance (dominant vs. subordinate status within the pair). Videotape coding focused on verbal and nonverba...

Sixteen preschool, first-, and third-grade children were presented with short stories ending with a verbal statement by a story character. Two alternative ending statements were provided. One alternative violated a postulate (H. P. Grice, 1975, in P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics (Vol. 3), New York: Academic Press) or a reasonable r...

This study compared 17 abused and 17 matched, nonabused children on their ability to identify six facial expressions of emotions and on teacher ratings of social competency. Abused children were less skilled in decoding facial expressions of emotions and were rated less socially competent than nonabused children. The findings suggest a strategy for...

Using the Ethological Approach: Profits and Pitfalls - Volume 2 Issue 1 - Linda A. Camras

Ethology is a branch of evolutionary biology which focuses on the behavioral, rather than the morphological, characteristics of animal species. Since ethologists originally restricted themselves to investigating nonhuman organisms, of necessity they developed a methodology particularly appropriate to the study of nonverbal behaviors. In recent year...

2 studies explored children's understanding of some facial expressions observed to occur during conflict encounters. The investigated expressions are hypothesized to influence the outcome of object disputes between children. Several of these "target" expressions are components of complete facial expressions of emotion. In study 1, subjects were sho...

72 pairs of kindergarten children were each given a brief play session involving an object with which only 1 child could play at a time. Facial expressions used by children defending their possession of the object were studied. Results showed a relationship between the facial expressions a child used and both his own subsequent behavior and that of...

consider recent research on facial expression in light of [S. Tomkins's 1962] theoretical model [the "facial feedback hypothesis"] / focus on studies of expression production involving adult Ss / [describe] new developments in facial coding systems [and] examine current knowledge about the neurophysiological basis of facial expression and the issue...