Several studies have exploited the face inversion paradigm to unveil the mechanisms underlying the processing of adult faces, showing that emotion recognition relies more on a global/configural processing for sadness and on a piecemeal/featural processing for happiness. This difference might be due to the higher biological salience of negative rather than positive emotions and consequently should be higher for infant rather than adult faces. In fact, evolution might have promoted specific adaptations aimed to prioritize the infant face by the attention system in order to foster survival during infancy, a rather long period during which the newborn depends entirely on adults. Surprisingly, no study has yet exploited this paradigm to investigate the processing of emotions from infant faces. In this study, the face inversion paradigm was used to explore emotion recognition of infant compared with adult faces in a sample of adult participants. In addition, the existence of potential differences associated with specific postural biases (e.g., the left-cradling bias) during interactions with infants was explored. The presence of rotational effects for the recognition of both happy and sad infant faces suggests that infant face emotions are predominantly processed in a configural fashion, this perceptual effect being more evident in sadness. Results are discussed in the context of the biological and social salience of the emotional infant face.

一些研究利用面部反转范式揭示了成人面部处理的机制，表明情绪识别更多地依赖于悲伤的全局/配置处理和快乐的零碎/特征处理。这种差异可能是由于消极情绪而不是积极情绪的生物学显着性更高，因此对于婴儿而不是成人面孔应该更高。事实上，进化可能促进了特定的适应，旨在通过注意力系统优先考虑婴儿的面部，以促进婴儿期的生存，这是一个相当长的时期，新生儿完全依赖成年人。令人惊讶的是，目前还没有研究利用这种范式来研究婴儿面部情绪的处理。在这项研究中，面部倒置范式用于探索婴儿与成人面部样本的情绪识别相比。此外，还探讨了在与婴儿互动过程中与特定姿势偏差（例如，左抱式偏差）相关的潜在差异的存在。识别快乐和悲伤婴儿面孔的旋转效应的存在表明婴儿面孔情绪主要以配置方式处理，这种感知效应在悲伤中更为明显。结果在情感婴儿面孔的生物学和社会显着性的背景下进行了讨论。探索了与婴儿互动过程中的左抱偏向。识别快乐和悲伤婴儿面孔的旋转效应的存在表明婴儿面孔情绪主要以配置方式处理，这种感知效应在悲伤中更为明显。结果在情感婴儿面孔的生物学和社会显着性的背景下进行了讨论。探索了与婴儿互动过程中的左抱偏向。识别快乐和悲伤婴儿面孔的旋转效应的存在表明婴儿面孔情绪主要以配置方式处理，这种感知效应在悲伤中更为明显。结果在情感婴儿面孔的生物学和社会显着性的背景下进行了讨论。