Have you ever hung over a baby’s park and got the feeling that the little one was judging you with his look? That thought is not very strange, because a new study shows that the disapproving look of babies is very telling and very positive.
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An angry look, frown or staring eyes: those judgy looks on that little face do have meaning, according to a new scientific study. The research, published in the magazine Nature Human Behaviour, was performed on about 120 eight-month-old babies. They were subjected to a series of experiments aimed at understanding the non-verbal signs of our little ones.
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throwing punches
During a first round, the babies were shown two animated characters on a computer screen. Their eyes followed the entire experiment and if they stared at one of the two characters long enough, it was destroyed.
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In the second experiment, the babies were shown a video of one of the two characters hitting the other. At the end of that cutscene, both characters reappeared on the screen. After that action, the babies were significantly more likely to destroy the punching character as they looked at it for a longer period of time.
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The two videos were repeated several times, with the action varying each time. On one occasion, the video showed a soft blow from a falling object. The other time a situation where both characters had an equal chance of being punished by the baby. The latter video was shown to prevent the children from focusing their attention only on the character that dealt the blow first from the start.
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(Read more below the photo.)
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A look is worth a thousand words
The conclusions of the experiment were clear. The babies specifically disapproved of the violent social interactions. “The results are surprising. We found that the babies chose to punish the aggressive character by focusing and widening their gaze on that person,” said psychologist and researcher Yasuhiro Kanakogi of Osaka University in Japan.
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“We wanted to know whether the judging of antisocial others by third parties is already present at a young age. If so, as it turns out, then it indicates that babies possess some form of morality from a very early age. Morality is an important but mysterious thing that makes us human. The fact that this experiment now shows that it is already present at such a young age is of course only positive.”
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Also read:
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A baby has 9 kinds of cry and each kind has a different meaning
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