WEDNESDAY, Jan. 22, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- You can teach your 1-year-old to choose one toy over another by showing a negative emotion about the toy you don't want her to touch.
So, too, can your television set.
In a study to determine when babies begin to understand that emotional connections are about "things" -- such as the fact that someone's happy response to a blue ball means that the ball itself is what is making them smile -- a Tufts University psychologist discovered that 12-month-old babies responded to negative emotions shown about certain toys while 10-month-old babies did not.
However, what she also learned was that this teaching worked when the children watched it on television. They responded to an actress on television just as they would to a live person in the room with them.
"They were able to watch something on television and actually use the information to make decisions themselves and guide their behavior," says Donna Mumme, the Tufts psychologist and lead author of the study, which appears in the January/February issue of Child Development.
"The study was done in a controlled environment with no other distractions, and I don't know how [the findings] would generalize to the home environment. But parents may want to think twice about what's on the television for their 1-year-old," she says.
"This study shows how precociously sensitive babies are to emotional cues. Facial expressions and tones of voice are fairly subtle," says Dara Musher-Eizenman, a psychologist at Ohio's Bowling Green State University.
"Further, the cues that the infants are responding to are available on the television," she adds. "It's surprising that they don't need a real interaction."
Infants spend much of the time when they are awake watching the actions and reactions of people around them, including on television, Mumme says. Her research is aimed at how babies process the information they take in.
She and colleague Anne Fernald of Stanford University conducted two studies, one of 32 babies aged 10 months and the second of 32 babies aged 12 months.
For each group, the researchers gave the babies toys to play with, including a blue ball, a red spiral letter holder, and a yellow garden hose attachment. The infants then watched a videotape of an actress playing with the same objects. The actress responded positively, neutrally, or negatively to each object. Her visual and audio responses were based on accepted research standards established to record emotions.
After watching the video, the babies were then given the objects again. The 10-month-old babies were not influenced by the video, and played with the objects the same way they had before, but the 12-month babies did respond to the video Mumme found.
If the actress responded positively or neutrally to the objects, the older infants played happily with them. However, after observing the actress respond negatively to an object, the 12-month-old infants all chose to avoid playing with it and chose instead the other one offered to them.
"These infants were not a part of the interactions, but even watching the emotions they were still able to use the information," Mumme says.
Mumme says there could be several reasons why the 10-month-old babies didn't respond to the video.
"Maybe it was because the demonstration was on television, or maybe there is a developmental difference between them and the 12-month olds," she says. "There might be some underlying cognitive development necessary. For instance, you need to follow the person's gaze, and these babies might not have that skill."
Mumme is now studying how long infants are affected by what they see on television.
"We're looking at whether infants remember what was on television. If you put a delay in the study, would they still remember?" she says.
In the meantime, Mumme suggests parents not underestimate how well babies can pick up emotional signals.
"If you're anxious about a doctor's visit for your 12-month-old, you might not want to show it. A baby could pick up on that," she says.
More information
Read the American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement recommending no television for children under 2. Information about the effect of TV violence on children can be found at the American Psychological Association.
