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In the present study we aim at further understanding infants' affect sharing by investigating their emotional arousal responses to both positive and negative emotional expressions. Empathy is an emotional response triggered by and isomorph with another's emotional state or condition, and which is modulated to a certain degree by regulatory mechanisms and awareness of the other as source of one's own affective state. Affect sharing is central to the ability to empathize with others. Existent data suggests that infants are not only able to discriminate between different emotional expressions, and successfully use this information to disambiguate the meaning of objects and situations, but that they also respond with matching affective states. Infants are exposed from a very few days after birth to an increasingly complex social environment, in which other's emotions convey rich information about the ongoing interactions and the environment they encounter. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.įunding: This research was supported by the Canada Research Chair Program, by NSERC (322013) and CFI (203229) grants to PH, and by a NSERC Research Capacity Development Grant to EG. Received: MaAccepted: OctoPublished: November 16, 2011Ĭopyright: © 2011 Geangu et al. PLoS ONE 6(11):Įditor: Angela Sirigu, French National Centre for Scientific Research, France Importantly, an asymmetry with stronger responses for negative emotions seems to be already present at this age.Ĭitation: Geangu E, Hauf P, Bhardwaj R, Bentz W (2011) Infant Pupil Diameter Changes in Response to Others' Positive and Negative Emotions. These findings suggest that arousal responses for negative as well as for positive emotions are present in the second half of the first postnatal year. Larger pupil sizes for another's distress compared to another's happiness were recorded shortly after stimulus onset for the older infants, and in a later time window for the 6-month-olds. Importantly, we also found evidence for an asymmetry in autonomous arousal towards positive versus negative emotional displays. Perceiving other's happiness also induced larger pupil diameters but for shorter time intervals.

For all participants the perception of another's distress triggered larger pupil diameters. In this study we measured 6- and 12-month-old infants' changes in pupil diameter when presented with the image and sound of peers experiencing happiness, distress and an emotionally neutral state.

It has been suggested that infants resonate emotionally to others' positive and negative affect displays, and that these responses become stronger towards emotions with negative valence around the age of 12-months.