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Responses to mothers' presentations of happy, sad, and angry faces were studied in a sample of 12 infants, 6 boys and 6 girls at age 10 weeks _+ 5 days. Each infant's mother displayed noncontingent, practiced facial and vocal expressions of the three emotions. Each expression occurred four times, with a 20-s head-turn-away between presentations. The orders of presentation were randomly assigned within sex of infant. Mothers' and infants' facial behaviors were coded using the Maximally Discriminative Facial Movement Coding System. The data indicated that (a) the infants discriminated each emotion, (b) apparent matching responses may occur under some conditions but not all, and (c) these apparent matching responses were only a part of nonrandom behavior patterns indicating induced emotional or affective responses of infants to mothers' alfective expressions.
Haviland et al. (Thu,) studied this question.