XVIth International Conference on Infant Studies
Vancouver, Canada, March 27-29, 2008

Program Information


Abstracts

Download the abstract book for the entire conference (2MB)

Preconference Program
 

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>

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Infant Mental Health: Bridging the Gap From Research to Clinical Practice
Wednesday, 26 March 2008, 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Westin Bayshore, Bayshore Ballroom - Salon F
$25 fee (includes refreshments)

Organizers & contacts:

Dr. Prachi Shah - pshah@bcm.edu
Dr. Martin Maldonado - mmaldonado@fsgctopeka.com

This interactive symposium will review the salient research in infant mental health, and discuss how early social emotional development is optimized in the context of the early parent-child relationship. Using videotaped case demonstrations, we will present a theoretical model for early relationship assessment which incorporates the parent's perceptions of the child, and an observation of early dyadic interactions.

We will then attempt to "bridge the gap" between the theories of infant mental health and clinical practice by discussing the findings of approximately 320 infants and their caregivers who presented to an infant mental health clinic with concerns about a disturbance in the early parent-child relationship. We will highlight the “lessons learned” from clinical work with these infants and families, and propose how the research in infant mental health informs the understanding of the clinical phenomena, and guides appropriate multimodal interventions for infants who present with early emotional dysregulation.

Discussion Leaders:

Prachi Shah, MD is a Board Certified Pediatrician and Board-Certified Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrician at Texas Children’s Hospital, and an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. She is a former ZERO TO THREE® Solnit Fellow, whose professional and research interests include attachment, the early identification and treatment of parent-child relationship disturbances, and social-emotional development of premature infants.

Martin Maldonado, MD is a board certified child and adolescent psychiatrist, currently a professor at the University of Missouri in Kansas City and a clinician at the Truman Medical Center, Kansas City Mo. He has worked in the field of infant mental health for 15 years and is mid-career fellow of Zero to Three. He is adjunct professor for infant psychopathology at Kansas State University and clinical professor at Kansas University School of Medicine. He has published multiple articles and several books on the subject of Infant Mental Health.

Also contributing to the is symposium are Dr. Pam MacDonald, Professor of Psychology at Washburn University and Charles Millhuff DO, of the Family Service and Guidance Center, Topeka, Kansas.

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Conventionality across domains in cognitive development
Wednesday, 26 March 2008, 08:00 to 4:30 pm
Westin Bayshore, Bayshore Ballroom - Salon E
$25 fee (by invitation only)

Organizer & contact:

Deborah Siegel, dsiegel@ucsc.edu
Event site: http://cogsci.wisc.edu/convention/

The ability to establish and follow social conventions is a unique and important hallmark of human society. Social conventions facilitate the coordination of cooperative action, thought, and communication. By adhering to or flouting conventions, individuals mark their membership and status within a given social group or institution. Intriguingly, some research suggests that even very young infants are sensitive to certain aspects of conventions (such as language). However, a full characterization of infants’ and older children’s abilities has been difficult because little theoretical or empirical work has targeted the nature of the learning problem that conventional knowledge poses. Similarly, little is known about the settings within which children might be required to act (or think) in a preferred conventional manner (see Kalish & Sabbagh, 2007).

Nonetheless, a number of developmental psychologists have begun to address the extent to which social conventions must play a role in guiding children’s developing competence across a variety of domains including language, categorization, tool use and play. The goal of this pre-conference is to bring these researchers together to identify commonalities and differences in our approach to the “conventionality framework.” In particular, we hope that we can leverage the differences in our content domains to hone in on the common learning problem conventional knowledge poses. More generally, we hope that this discussion, will lay the foundation for a broader, integrative framework that has the potential to highlight the ways in which these rather diverse content domains might be related in cognitive development. To achieve this goal, we would like to invite contributors to a recent edited volume examining conventionality in cognitive development (Kalish & Sabbagh, 2007) in addition to other developmental psychologists who have worked on the problems of defining of conventionality and its development across a number of content domains. We hope that this pre-conference will contribute to our understanding the ontogeny of conventional understanding.

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Information Session - Noldus Information Technology
"From Behavioral Observations to Data Analysis: How to Get the Most Out of Your Research"
Wednesday, 26 March 2008, 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm Westin Bayshore, Mackenzie Room
Free!

Organizer & contact:

Paige Roderick, paige.roderick@noldus.com

This two-part interactive workshop is designed to assist with your observational research and basic lab set-up needs. The first part will focus on general behavior research and will include information on:
different observation methods, pattern detection, benefits of analysis, how to code observations, reliability analysis, and synchronizing behavior with external data. The second part of the course is designed to help facilitate explaining observation lab setup methodology using real world examples of labs Noldus has installed.

To register for this session, please contact Paige Roderick at paige.roderick@noldus.com. The session is free, but registration is necessary.

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