This National Science Foundation (NSF) grant under the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences program (CFDA 47.075) provides $648,938 to Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey to conduct research on how infants learn about emotions through their everyday social interactions.
The project aims to document the emotional expressions that infants see in natural settings and how this "emotional input" informs their developing understanding of emotions. Researchers will use head-mounted cameras to capture video of infants and their caregivers during routine activities like play and feeding, and then analyze how caregivers' emotional facial expressions and language predict infants' performance on tasks measuring emotion perception. This research is expected to provide new insights into the early development of emotion understanding and lay the groundwork for future work on abstract emotion categories. The project will be conducted over 3 years, from June 2024 through May 2027. No sub-awards are planned under this grant.