Baby’s smile is a social expression
Babies smile socially, even at just eight months of age, a new study indicates.
Each of twenty infants was left to play in a room, alone except for the baby’s mother, while researchers from Indiana University filmed the scene. Mothers were instructed to watch their babies play for half of the allotted time period and, for the other half, to read a magazine while ignoring the infant as much as possible.
How much the infants looked at their mother didn’t depend on whether their mum was reading or not – they looked at her roughly once a minute in either case. But whether or not they smiled was affected by whether their mother was looking at them. The infants rarely smiled at their mother when she was reading, but smiled roughly 50 per cent of the time when they looked at her and she was watching. The babies rarely smiled when they were facing the toys.
Much is yet to be learned about how babies experience the world. Even so fundamental a question as whether pre-linguistic children possess consciousness has been open to debate (in academia, and on Edge.org). Tufts philosopher Daniel C. Dennet doubts that babies are really conscious, in a strict sense. But UC-Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik argues otherwise:
I believe, but cannot prove, that babies and young children are actually more conscious, more vividly aware of their external world and internal life, than adults are.
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I think that, for babies, every day is first love in Paris. Every wobbly step is skydiving, every game of hide and seek is Einstein in 1905.
For adults, though, life happens–all too often–when we’re not paying attention.
Can anything else in this world capture the pure wonder of possibility that we find in a baby’s smile? But that smile reminds us, too, of what we have lost.