Tuza, Alexander2024-07-022024-07-022022https://hdl.handle.net/2440/141525This item is only available electronically.Caregiver-infant communications are often dominated by facial expressions, considered essential in maintaining mutual affect and coordinating emotional co-regulation (Gianino & Tronick, 1988; Trevarthen & Aitken, 2001). Despite infants being well studied by psychology, many of the observations made in controlled experiments or qualitative studies have yet to be examined outside of psychology laboratories. To this end, this study aimed to explore (1) the face presentation behaviours of caregivers interacting with their crying infants, and (2) the patterns of facial emotional expressions they used while doing so. Secondary analysis was undertaken on the SAYCam Dataset (Sullivan et al., 2021), comprising three infants and over 477 hours of infant-perspective, head-mounted videocamera footage. Infant cries were identified using Seewave in R, and manually verified as crying. Facial expressions were detected and analysed using iMotions integrated Affectiva AFFDEX, then manually reviewed for false positives and extended by coding for additional variables. Mixed effects models were used to account for random variance. Results of the first two models suggest that while caregivers did not present their faces differently during crying compared to non-crying periods, less face presentation was found before crying. The second two models did not find a general pattern of caregiver emotional expressions towards infants during crying. Different levels of positive valence were observed across crying periods, and different patterns of emotion categories against cry pitch. Taken together, these results suggest infant-caregiver interactions are far less typical, and each dyadic relationship far more individual, than is often observed in controlled experiments. Keywords: infants, intersubjectivity, emotional expressions, crying, fussingHonours; PsychologyThesis