Babies' everyday emotional world, ages 6–17 months
Official title: Describing the emotional environment of the infant from 6 to 17 months
Funded at Rutgers the State Univ of Nj Newark · NIH-11169812 · Data updated 2026-11-12
This project looks at the facial expressions and emotion words babies hear and see between 6 and 17 months to better understand how they learn about feelings.
Quick facts
| Grant type | R21 grant |
|---|---|
| Study type | NIH-funded research |
| Funding institution | Rutgers the State Univ of Nj Newark NIH-funded |
| Lab location | 1 site (Newark, United States) |
| Project start | August 14, 2024 |
| Project end | July 31, 2027 |
| Funding year | 2025 |
| Award (this year) | $196,250 |
| NIH project number | 5R21HD112313-02 |
| Project ID | NIH-11169812 on NIH RePORTER |
Who could benefit from this research
✓Could help
Ideal candidates are infants aged 6 to 17 months and their primary caregivers, especially those able to provide or allow use of home or lab interaction recordings.
✕Less likely to help
Families with children outside the 6–17 month age range or without relevant interaction recordings are unlikely to benefit directly from this project.
What this research studies
Researchers will use three existing collections of home and lab videos of infants with their caregivers and will code caregivers' facial expressions and the emotion words they use. They will measure how often different emotions appear, how much facial expressions vary, and which emotion labels are most common. The team will also examine when faces and emotion words happen together and how those patterns change across 6 to 17 months. The goal is to create a detailed picture of infants' natural emotional experience as they begin to learn about feelings.
Why it matters
Potential benefit: If successful, this work could help parents and clinicians understand typical early emotion learning and guide supports for social-emotional development.
How similar studies have gone: Previous research has described caregiver behaviors and infant emotion perception, but combining multiple real-world video and transcript datasets to map infants' natural exposure to facial expressions and emotion words is a newer approach.
Where this research is happening
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Rutgers the State Univ of Nj Newark
Newark, United States Active
Researchers
- Principal investigator: Lobue, Vanessa — Rutgers the State Univ of Nj Newark
- Study coordinator: Lobue, Vanessa
About this research
- This is an active NIH-funded research project — typically early-stage science, not a clinical trial accepting patient enrollment.
- Some NIH-funded labs run parallel clinical studies or seek volunteers for related work. To check, contact the principal investigator or institution listed above.
- For full project details, budget, and progress reports, visit the official NIH RePORTER page.