Infant-centered behavioral response patterns to discrete emotions.

Abstract

Responding to others' emotions entails the coordination of multiple behaviors. Yet, research on such responding typically analyses each behavior separately. We investigated the heterogeneity of 16-, 19-, and 24-month-old infants' (N = 296, 51.4% girls; 3.1% African American, 10.1% Asian, 12.9% Hispanic, 44.7% White, 29.2% other racial/ethnic groups) behavioral response patterns to five discrete emotions (joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust) during a naturalistic interaction. Various infant behaviors (social avoidance, security seeking, stimulus exploration, prosocial responding, information seeking, relaxed play) in response to the emotional context were coded. A latent-class analysis revealed four distinct classes of behaviors: prosocial exploring, active information seeking, cautious information seeking, and relaxed playing. Finally, a generalized linear mixed-effect model examined the differences in class prevalence across discrete emotions, across age groups, and between age groups within emotions. The analysis revealed several interesting differences in the frequency of each class across emotions and ages. This is the first study to utilize an infant-centered analysis to identify patterns of goal-directed behaviors in response to discrete emotions. Our findings suggest that infants are able to coordinate a variety of goal-directed behaviors to respond to emotional contexts. Furthermore, the utilization of each pattern of behaviors might be driven by the valence of the context. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).