Nicki HDC

Nicki presented at the Psychology Department’s Hard Data Cafe on April 5th. She gave a talk titled Infants’ Perception of Emotion from Body Movements which included the results of her dissertation research on this topic. In this research, she used an intermodal preference technique where infants viewed side by side videos of an angry and happy body movement while hearing either a happy or angry vocalization. She found that 6.5-month-old infants were able to match the emotions portrayed in the body movements to the vocalization emotion and that infants preferred to view the body movement that was congruent with the vocalization. Additionally, infants looked longer at the congruent body posture when viewing static images of happy and angry bodies while hearing either the happy or angry vocalization.