The Role of Family Expressiveness in Infants' Multimodal Emotion Processing: Behavioral Evidence from 6-8 Months

Emotion understanding is an ability that emerges early in life and plays a crucial role in our socio-emotional development. The family environment provides great opportunities for infants to practice and refine this skill. The present study aims to investigate the influence of family expressiveness on infants’ emotion processing abilities, a relationship that remains understudied in the literature. Using an Intermodal Matching Paradigm, we examined eight infants aged 6-8 months to assess their ability to match emotions across facial and vocal modalities by presenting happy-angry, angry-neutral, and neutral-happy pairings. Family expressiveness was measured through parent report using the Family Expressiveness Questionnaire (FEQ). Our results showed a stronger looking preference for the happy matching trials compared to the angry or neutral ones, as well as a positive correlation between family expressiveness and infants’ ability to match happy faces/voices. Although these results did not reach statistical significance, the data suggest early sensitivity to positive emotions and highlight the influence of family expressiveness in supporting emotion-matching abilities during infancy.