‘The Way You Make Me Feel’: Infants’ and Adults’ Behavioural and Physiological Responses to Emotional Stimuli

Empathy, or understanding the perspectives and emotional states of others, is an integral part of functioning human relationships. Emotional contagion, the proposed precursor to empathy, occurs when one feels what another is feeling and has been found in infants even a few hours old. Contagious crying paradigms have assessed emotional contagion in infants across the first year of life; however, these studies often lack objectivity and comparableness in measurement and have emphasised emotional contagion for negative emotions (i.e., crying). In the present study, therefore, I examined adults’ (in Experiment 1) and 6.5- to 9.5-month-old infants’ (Experiment 2) behavioural and physiological responses to positive and negative emotional stimuli. All participants listened to recordings of infants crying and laughing plus two control recordings and their heart rate, and facial expressions were analysed. In addition, infants were observed during mother-infant play periods to investigate the effect of maternal responsiveness on their emotional contagion responses. The adults selfreported their emotional contagion and completed self-report empathy and prosocial behaviour measures; established correlates of emotional contagion. In both experiments, the heart rate measure was not informative given issues with movement artefacts. In Experiment 1, emotional contagion to positive and negative emotional stimuli was evidenced through the adults’ facial expressions and self-report. Furthermore, links between emotional contagion and empathy were supported. In Experiment 2, there was support for positive emotional contagion responses, but less support for negative emotional contagion. Problems with apparent but tentative links between infantile emotional contagion and empathy-related constructs were suggested