Baby FACS: Facial Action Coding System for Infants and Young Children
Wednesday, 26 March 2008, 1:00 pm to 5:30 pm
Westin Bayshore, Seymour Room
$100 fee (includes refreshments)

Organizers & contacts:
Harriet Oster - harriet.oster@nyu.edu

This workshop is an introduction to Baby FACS coding and an overview of modifications of FACS for infants and young children. Prior training in the adult FACS will not be required, although some familiarity with FACS and/or experience coding infant or child behavior is recommended.

Oster’s Baby FACS (Facial Action Coding System for Infants and Young Children) is a modification for infants and young children of Ekman and Friesen’s comprehensive, anatomically based adult FACS measurement system. The Baby FACS manual has recently been thoroughly revised to be consistent with Ekman, Friesen, and Hager’s 2002 revision of the FACS manual and includes new illustrations of the FACS Action Units in infants and young children.

The theoretical perspective underlying Baby FACS is the view that infant facial expressions are not just immature precursors of adult facial expressions, but rather biologically based adaptations crucial for the infant's survival and normal development. This perspective demands an objective, fine-grained measurement system to describe the facial expressions produced by infants and young children in a wide range of contexts. [See Oster, H. (2005). The Repertoire of infant facial expressions: An Ontogenetic perspective. In J. Nadel and D. Muir (Eds), Emotional development (pp. 261-292). New York: Oxford University Press.]

Unlike coding systems that use templates based on prototypical adult expressions, Baby FACS makes it possible to describe infant facial expressions in terms of their constituent facial muscle actions, independent of prior assumptions about their correspondence to adult emotions. Therefore, it is possible to trace developmental changes and continuities in emotional expressions. Baby FACS is uniquely suited to studying facial behavior related to sensory, perceptual, and cognitive processes, social interaction, emotion, and emotion regulation. It is also uniquely suited to studying subtle individual and cultural differences in facial behavior in normative and atypical populations.

This introductory workshop will begin with an overview of the theoretical and methodological issues underlying the development of Baby FACS, including the continuing debate about the development of differentiated facial expressions of negative emotions. We will then discuss Infant-adult differences in facial morphology and the effect these differences have on the appearance changes produced by facial muscle actions. Modifications of FACS Action Units (AUs) and coding criteria for infants and children and problems commonly encountered in coding infant facial expressions will be discussed.

The second half of the workshop will focus on the repertoire of infant facial expressions, with examples of distinctive patterns of facial expression seen in infants and young children, including taste- and attention-related expressions, variants and intensities of smiles and cry faces, modulations of negative affect expressions, and expressions reflecting efforts to regulate emotion. Findings from research involving typically developing infants and toddlers and infants in several pediatric populations will be presented to illustrate the advantages of an empirical approach to research on facial expression in infants and children. Participants will have an opportunity to discuss their own studies and to brainstorm coding and data analysis strategies.

Space is limited to approximately 25 participants. For questions about the workshop or about Baby FACS, contact Harriet Oster <harriet.oster@nyu.edu>