Baby don't cry: Unconscious sensitivity to sad baby faces.

Infant cues are known to play a crucial role in eliciting caregiving responses, making them essential for survival and development of offspring. Yet, it is still unknown whether infant faces may attract adults' attention when presented under the level of consciousness. Using a disengagement task and an eye-tracker procedure, this study investigated whether the subliminal exposure to emotional baby vs adult faces affects mothers' (N = 57) and non-mothers' (N = 57) attention disengagement.

Infants' facial electromyographic responses to the sight of emotional interpersonal touch.

Adult studies have shown that observed interpersonal touch provides crucial information about others' emotional states. Yet, despite the unique communicative function of touch during development, very little is known about infants' sensitivity to the emotional valence of observed touches. To investigate this issue, we measured facial electromyographic (EMG) activity in response to positive (caress) and negative (scratches) observed touches in a sample of 11-month-old infants.

Newborns' perception of approach and withdrawal from biological movement: A closeness story.

Since birth, infants discriminate the biological motion (BM) revealed by point-light displays (PLDs). To date, no studies have explored whether newborns differentiate BM that approaches rather than withdraws from them. Yet, approach and withdrawal are two fundamental motivations in the socio-emotional world, key to developing empathy and prosocial behavior.

Neural signatures to prosocial and antisocial interactions in young infants.

Preverbal infants appear to be more attracted by prosocial characters and events, as typically assessed using preferential looking times and manual choice. However, infants' neural correlates of observed prosocial and antisocial interactions are still scarce. Here, we familiarized 5-month-old ( = 24) infants with a prosocial and antisocial scene (i.