Impact of babyface schema on time perception: Insights from neutral and crying facial expressions

  • Lina Jia , 1 ,
  • Bingjie Shao 1 ,
  • Lili Wang 2 ,
  • Xiaocheng Wang 1 ,
  • Zhuanghua Shi 3
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  • 1. School of Education, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China
  • 2. School of Educational Science, Huaiyin Normal University, Huaian, China
  • 3. Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, Munich, Germany
jialina@jiangnan.edu.cn

Received date: 29 Aug 2023

Accepted date: 06 Apr 2024

Published date: 20 Mar 2024

Copyright

2024 2024 The Authors. PsyCh Journal published by Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd.

Abstract

Facial expressions in infants have been noted to create a spatial attention bias when compared with adult faces. Yet, there is limited understanding of how adults perceive the timing of infant facial expressions. To investigate this, we used both infant and adult facial expressions in a temporal bisection task. In Experiment 1, we compared duration judgments of neutral infant and adult faces. The results revealed that participants felt that neutral infant faces lasted for a shorter time than neutral adult faces, independent of participant sex. Experiment 2 employed sad (crying) facial expressions. Here, the female participants perceived that the infants' faces were displayed for a longer duration than the adults' faces, whereas this distinction was not evident among the male participants. These findings highlight the influence of the babyface schema on time perception, nuanced by emotional context and sex-based individual variances.

Cite this article

Lina Jia , Bingjie Shao , Lili Wang , Xiaocheng Wang , Zhuanghua Shi . Impact of babyface schema on time perception: Insights from neutral and crying facial expressions[J]. Psych Journal, 2024 , 13(3) : 398 -406 . DOI: 10.1002/pchj.766

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