The first of the two studies set out to answer a question that has long interested developmental scientists: what actually happens inside a baby when a joyful exchange with a parent unfolds? To find out, the researchers measured changes in the heart rates of nearly 1,000 four-month-old infants as they engaged in positive interactions with their mothers. Electrodes were attached to the babies’ chests and stomachs, while trained observers watched the mother-infant pairs and recorded, moment by moment, whether each member of the pair displayed positive, neutral, or negative engagement. This combination of continuous physiological recording and fine-grained behavioral observation allowed the team to link what was happening between the mother and baby with what was happening inside the baby’s body.

The physiological measure at the center of the study was respiratory sinus arrhythmia, a form of heart-rate variability that is coupled with breathing. Scientists understand this variability to be a biological indicator tied to emotion regulation and to a person’s adaptability to different environments. In adults and in children, higher heart-rate variability in this range is generally associated with a more flexible capacity to respond to social and emotional demands. By calculating this measure from the infants’ heart-rate data, the researchers could ask whether moments of shared positivity were accompanied by shifts in the biological systems that support emotional self-regulation.

The answer was striking. The researchers found increases in the babies’ heart-rate variability precisely when the infants and their mothers were positively engaged at the same time. Crucially, the same physiological changes did not appear when only the baby was smiling, or when only the mother was showing positive emotion. Both partners had to be on the same positive wavelength for the effect to emerge. Daniel Messinger, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences and a senior author on the paper, put it plainly: “They both have to be positive. When they’re both positive, particularly for longer periods of time, you see this increase in the baby’s heart rate.”

That mutual requirement may be the study’s most important insight. It suggests that emotional development is not simply a matter of a happy baby or an affectionate parent acting alone. Instead, the physiological states associated with emotion regulation appear to be recruited during genuine two-way exchanges, in which both the caregiver and the infant are sharing positive affect simultaneously. “Play is not just fun and games. It’s influencing the baby’s physiology,” said Messinger, who is also a professor of pediatrics. “There’s something about positive sociality that’s associated with this internal baby state. The baby’s physiology is linked to what’s going on in the interaction.” In other words, the interaction itself, not the mood of either partner in isolation, is what seems to matter.

The scale and design of the study lend weight to its conclusions. The research was part of a national study on drug exposure conducted at four sites across the country, including Miami, and involved several universities. When the team analyzed the heart-rate data, they controlled for prenatal drug exposure and social adversity, helping to ensure that the observed link between shared positivity and heart-rate variability was not simply an artifact of those factors. Among the members of the research team was Samantha G. Mitsven, a University of Miami alumna who worked on the study while completing her Ph.D. in developmental and child psychology. With nearly 1,000 infants contributing data, the study represents one of the larger physiological investigations of early mother-infant interaction.

The second study, also published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, approached infant smiling from a different angle by asking how babies and adults influence each other’s smiling over time. The researchers observed 58 infants at two ages, 4 months and 8 months, while the babies interacted with their mothers, their fathers, and a stranger. This design allowed the team to compare smiling dynamics across different relationship partners within the same infants, revealing patterns that would be invisible in studies focused on mothers alone.

The results showed a clear division of labor in early smiling exchanges. Adults initiated and reciprocated smiling interactions at higher rates than infants did, and seeing an adult smile significantly increased the rate at which babies began smiling themselves. Babies, on the other hand, were more likely to be the ones who ended shared smiling moments, a pattern the researchers interpret as a possible sign that infants are learning to moderate their own excitement. The team also found developmental change: at 8 months, the babies were both more likely to start a smiling interaction on their own and more likely to reciprocate an adult’s smile compared with when they were 4 months old. “That suggests that the dyad becomes more dynamically responsive to one another at older ages,” said Messinger, who was a first author on the paper along with Eliala Alice Salvadori, who conducted the research for her dissertation at the University of Amsterdam, and Cristina Colonnesi, an associate professor at the University of Amsterdam. Another first author, Alan B. Cobo-Lewis, completed his postdoctoral fellowship and undergraduate studies at the University of Miami and is now an associate professor at the University of Maine.

Perhaps the most socially revealing finding came from the comparison across partners. At both ages, babies were most likely to return their mother’s smiles, compared with smiling interactions involving their fathers or an unknown adult. The adults who were strangers actually initiated and sustained smiles more often than the mothers did, yet the infants responded preferentially to their mothers. “This was, importantly, the first paper that involved not only moms and dads, but also strangers,” Messinger noted. “The strangers initiate and sustain smiles more than moms, but infants are more likely to smile back at the mom. So, the relationship really counts there.” The finding underscores that infant smiling is not a reflexive response to any friendly face, but a selectively tuned behavior shaped by the specific relationship between the baby and the person in front of them.

Together, the two studies sketch a picture of early emotional development as a genuinely interactive process. The heart-rate study shows that mutual positive engagement, sustained over time, is associated with increases in a physiological indicator linked to emotion regulation, while the smiling study shows that these exchanges become more fluid, reciprocal, and relationship-specific as infants grow from 4 to 8 months of age. For parents, the practical message is encouraging rather than demanding: ordinary moments of shared laughter and smiling are not idle pleasures but may be part of the biological work of early development. For scientists, the results open a window onto how social experience and physiology intertwine in the first months of life, suggesting that the foundations of emotional well-being are built not in solitude, but in the back-and-forth of a shared smile.

Subject of Research: The role of shared positive caregiver-infant interactions in infants' physiological and emotional development

Article Title: Shared smiles may shape infants’ emotional development

Article References: Shared smiles may shape infants’ emotional development. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: infant development, emotion regulation, heart-rate variability, respiratory sinus arrhythmia, mother-infant interaction, smiling, caregivers, developmental psychology, physiology, social interaction, University of Miami, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B

The editorial team behind the issue argues that the field has spent decades focusing heavily on emotion recognition: how accurately observers can identify what someone else is feeling from a face, a voice or a posture. The new collection deliberately shifts the lens inward, toward the person doing the expressing. Emotional expressions, the editors propose, should be understood in terms of their origins and development, their continuity across animal species, and the practical roles they play in behaviour and social life. In this framing, emotions become a visible inner world, a living link between brain, body and environment, rather than a private mental state that occasionally leaks to the surface.

Among the most striking contributions is a study co-conducted by Cristina Colonnesi of the University of Amsterdam, which examines how infants in their first year of life actively construct positive moments with the people around them. The researchers observed that eight-month-old babies, markedly more than four-month-olds, initiate episodes of shared positive emotion themselves. A typical sequence involves a baby smiling and then drawing an adult into mutual laughter, creating a loop of shared enjoyment that the infant, not the caregiver, set in motion. Rather than primarily reacting to another person’s smile, older babies increasingly deploy their own positive expressions as social tools, using them to start and sustain warm, enjoyable interactions.

That developmental shift may look subtle, but its implications are considerable. The ability to initiate, rather than merely respond to, shared positive emotion suggests growing flexibility in how infants use their emotional behaviour in social contexts. It hints that the foundations of humour, joint attention and even the social bonding that characterises later friendship may be laid in the first year of life, not through language or instruction, but through the infant’s own expressive behaviour. Shared laughter between a baby and an adult is, in this view, not a charming by-product of caregiving but a developmental achievement produced by the infant’s emerging expressive control.

A second line of work, presented by Milica Nikolić and colleagues, turns to self-conscious emotions: shame, guilt, shyness and pride. These emotions are distinctive because they arise when children begin to view themselves through the eyes of others, and the research shows that they are already visible in a child’s facial expressions, body posture and gaze during the first few years of life. Crucially, they prove to be far more than internal feelings. The studies reviewed in the issue indicate that these emotions have characteristic outward signatures and, more importantly, predictable behavioural consequences that begin shaping a child’s social world very early.

The consequences differ sharply depending on the emotion. When children feel guilty about something that has gone wrong, they are subsequently more likely to try to make amends, whether by helping others, sharing resources or repairing damage they have caused. Shame produces the opposite pattern: children who feel ashamed are more likely to withdraw, avoid eye contact and steer clear of the situations that triggered the feeling. Nikolić and her colleagues are careful to note that the evidence base is still limited, but they argue that these self-conscious emotions likely play an early role in shaping social behaviour and reputation, functioning as internal regulators that push children toward repair in one case and retreat in the other.

The third major contribution, from Disa Sauter and her team, dismantles one of the most persistent assumptions in popular psychology: that feeling good means smiling. In a study covering twenty-two different positive emotions, grounded in participants’ own personal experiences, the researchers mapped which facial muscles and movements are activated for each emotion. The results reveal that many positive feelings carry their own distinct facial profiles that involve no smile at all. Interest and determination are prime examples; in the case of determination, the defining feature is a raised chin rather than any movement of the mouth. Other positive emotions, such as amusement and elation, do involve distinct smiles, characterised by upturned corners of the mouth and often accompanied by closed eyes and strongly raised cheeks.

The technical significance of this work lies in its demonstration that positive facial behaviour is a heterogeneous family of expressions rather than a single gradient of smile intensity. Feeling good, the researchers show, manifests in a variety of facial configurations, including spontaneous ones, and the classic smile is only one member of that family. For fields ranging from affective computing to clinical screening, which often rely on smile detection as a proxy for positive affect, the findings suggest that such proxies may systematically miss positive states such as interest or determination, and may misread them when they appear without any mouth movement at all.

A fourth study, authored by postdoc Christopher Riddell, Milica Nikolić and colleagues, extends the comparative dimension of the issue by examining mimicry of the play face, an exaggerated, playful expression resembling a smile that typically appears during rough-and-tumble play. The researchers compared infants, adults and orangutans. Both human infants and adults were more likely to produce a play face themselves after observing one in another person than after seeing a neutral expression, and their own expressions mirrored what they saw even without any direct interaction with the person being mirrored. Orangutans, by contrast, rarely showed this behaviour. For them, play faces arise primarily during direct social play, whereas in humans contagious smiling can break free of the play context altogether and spread through observation alone.

Taken together, the nineteen articles of the special issue, published under the title Mechanisms, development, phylogeny and functions of emotional expressions, make a coherent case that emotional expressions are central to development from the very start, shaping both individual behaviour and the formation and regulation of social relationships, from a baby’s first self-initiated smile to the complex body language of shame and pride. In their editorial, Nikolić, Kret, Nummenmaa and Sauter call on the research community to study emotions more within real-life contexts, attending to how expressions emerge, develop and function for both the expresser and the people around them. If the collection is right, the smile that lights up a living room, the guilty glance after a broken vase and the raised chin of a determined child are not merely decorations on an inner life. They are the mechanisms through which that inner life reaches out and builds the social world.

Subject of Research: The development, evolution and social functions of emotional expressions in humans and other animals

Article Title: From a baby's smile to a monkey's grin: how emotions shape our behaviour

Article References: From a baby's smile to a monkey's grin: how emotions shape our behaviour. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: emotional expressions, infant development, smiling, self-conscious emotions, shame, guilt, facial expressions, play face, orangutans, mimicry, social behaviour, developmental psychology