What Eye Contact and Emotion Look Like Across Cultures and Species

What is it about?

This study examines how 1-year-old human and chimpanzee infants use eye contact (mutual gaze) and emotional expressions during everyday interactions. We compared multiple groups of infants from different cultural and ecological settings, including Western, farming, and foraging communities, as well as chimpanzees living in wild, captive, and sanctuary environments. We tested two common assumptions: that chimpanzee development is not shaped by environment, and that Western infants represent typical human development. By analyzing how often mutual gaze occurs and how it relates to emotion, we assessed whether these early social behaviors are consistent across groups, species, and contexts.

Featured Image

Photo by MediaEcke on Unsplash

Photo by MediaEcke on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Developmental science often relies on a narrow sample of Western populations, which can lead to misleading conclusions about what is “universal.” We found that mutual gaze occurs at similar rates across all groups, suggesting it is a shared and evolutionarily conserved behavior. However, emotional expression and how it co-occurs with eye contact varied across cultural and ecological settings. These findings show that early social development is shaped by environment in both humans and chimpanzees, challenging assumptions that Western samples represent all humans or that chimpanzee behavior is unaffected by context. This has important implications for developmental theory, cross-cultural research, and primate welfare, highlighting the need to study diverse populations to better understand social and emotional development.