Two new studies suggest that smiling and other positive interactions with caregivers help shape infants’ emotional development.

Children are vulnerable to disease, yet are poor at recognizing and avoiding sickness. We recruited 5–9-year-olds (N = 120, 38% female, 60% White, 48% Hispanic/Latine) to test whether children's sick...

A decade of ManyBabies research, testing thousands of babies across hundreds of labs, has shown that some, but not all findings in infant research replicate well. Collectively, these projects have sho...

Abstract. Understanding others’ intentions and emotions is supported by the mentalizing network, helping people navigate the inherently complex dynamics of

Please take 2 minutes today to urge Congress to reject the administration’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2027 budget proposal that seeks a complete dissolution of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SB...

A fully automated 3D tracking framework reveals that sex and familiarity strongly shape natural social gaze dynamics in freely interacting marmosets.

We, the undersigned academics and researchers from around the world, express our profound concern over recent military strikes on Iran, the retaliatory responses, and the reported impact on civilian l...

Individual variations in face-perception expertise become apparent by the second year of life. We propose that infants’ “face diet”—the nature and quantity of t...

Nature Reviews Psychology - Prenatal and multimodal origins of face perception

Using eye-gaze methods, this research investigated infants’ ability to make moral character inferences. For a wide range of moral roles, infants could use an agent’s past moral behavior to revise thei...

While early life sets the stage for later learning, comparatively less is known about newborns' cognition than that of older infants. A striking example is the lack of consensus regarding the extent ...

Abstract. Possible mechanisms behind newborn face preferences are debated, including innate templates, top-heavy bias, focus on eyes, and rapid learning ex

Scientists have long focused on quantifying fear and other negative emotions in animals. Now they’re trying to measure positive feelings — and it’s a challenge.

While early life sets the stage for later learning, comparatively less is known about newborns' cognition than that of older infants. A striking example is the lack of consensus regarding the extent ...

A series of graphics reveals how the Trump administration has sought historic cuts to science and the research workforce.

The 10th Annual Three Minute Thesis Competition showcased graduate students across the University of Miami presenting research in fields ranging from medicine and computer engineering to literature an...

In humans and non-human primates, male aggression and physical violence are common strategies in the struggle over power and are efficient in exerting…

In celebration of the first 25 years into the 21st Century, we invite review manuscripts for a special issue on A Quarter Century Review of Research on Infant Behavior and Development. Reviews should ...

Psychologists in the College of Arts and Sciences are monitoring the development of infants and toddlers whose parents have a sibling with autism.

Current Employees: If you are a current Staff, Faculty or Temporary employee at the University of Miami, please click here to log in to Workday to use the internal application process. To learn how to...

Automated behavioral measurement using machine learning is gaining ground in psychological research. Automated approaches have the potential to reduce the labor and time associated with manual behavio...

By clicking "Submit" below, you as a member of the faculty or senior staff at a U.S. institution of higher education, are endorsing the letter from faculty at Stanford University to the Chairs and Ran...

Maternal care is crucial for primate offspring development, particularly in species with prolonged developmental periods, such as humans and other primates. In this study, we used a cross-species and developmental approach to assess the role of mothers and infants in initiating bouts of affiliation (i.e., proximity and grooming) and visual engagement (i.e., unidirectional and mutual gaze) in humans (N = 10), great apes (N = 18) and small apes (N = 20). We observed mother-infant dyads when the offspring was 1, 6 and 12 months of age, using focal sampling. Our results showed that mothers were generally more likely than infants to initiate grooming, unidirectional and mutual gazes, but not proximity. As infants got older, mothers became even more likely to initiate unidirectional and mutual gazes, but infants also started to initiate proximity and unidirectional gazes more frequently, with infant-initiated mutual gazes peaking at around 6 months of age. Moreover, human mothers were more likely to initiate proximity than great ape mothers, and especially more than small ape mothers; in contrast, infants in great and small apes initiated proximity more frequently than human infants. These findings highlight important similarities between humans and other apes in the initiation patterns of affiliative interactions and visual engagement.

Primates -

Nature Communications - Abilities to distinguish between prosocial and antisocial actions are crucial for sustaining cooperative systems. Here, the authors show that human newborns with just 5 days...

New research from the Department of Psychology at the University of Miami looks at the efficacy of training adults to recognize sick faces.