Young children’s attentional bias patterns to emotional male and female faces

The current study examines attentional biases toward male and female emotional faces in a sample of infants and young children. Participants were 110 infants and young children who were between 9 and 48 months. These children watched a passive version of a dot probe task that included emotional (happy and angry) male and female faces. Results indicate that infants and young children show a significant attention bias towards female emotional faces, regardless of emotion, over female neutral faces, and that the opposite is true of male faces, with infants and young children showing an attention bias towards male neutral faces over emotional ones. Results are discussed from the context of infant experience with and exposure to male and female faces, and implications for child development research are explored.