Older but not younger infants associate own-race faces with happy music and other-race faces with sad music.
We used a novel intermodal association task to examine whether infants associate own- and other-race faces with music of different emotional valences. Three- to 9-month-olds saw a series of neutral own- or other-race faces paired with happy or sad musical excerpts. Three- to 6-month-olds did not show any specific association between face race and music. At 9 months, however, infants looked longer at own-race faces paired with happy music than at own-race faces paired with sad music. Nine-month-olds also looked longer at other-race faces paired with sad music than at other-race faces paired with happy music. These results indicate that infants with nearly exclusive own-race face experience develop associations between face race and music emotional valence in the first year of life. The potential implications of such associations for developing racial biases in early childhood are discussed.
Dr Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
Naiqi G
NG
Xiao
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Delaware, Newark, USA.
Paul C
PC
Quinn
Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Hangzhou, China.
Shaoying
S
Liu
Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Hangzhou, China.|Center for Psychological Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
Liezhong
L
Ge
LPNC - Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble, France.
Olivier
O
Pascalis
Dr Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
Kang
K
Lee
D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D004644:Emotions; D000066499:Facial Recognition; D005260:Female; D006240:Happiness; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D009146:Music / Q000523:psychology*; D063505:Racism / Q000523:psychology*