Adult judgments of infant emotions: Replication Studies within and across laboratories**

Questions about the biological patterning of facial expression have led to studies of presymbolic infants to see whether there are agreed-upon expressions of emotion relevant for caregiving. The current study assessed the reliability of emotion identification among adult judges who responded to context-free photographs of infant faces which conveyed emotions ranging widely in intensity and clarity of signal. Judges gave free response labels which were subsequently sorted into 10 emotion categories by use of a standard lexicon. Paired groups of judges from two laboratories labeled four sets of infant pictures. Agreement, assessed by correlating one group's judgments of the emotions present in a picture set with a second group's judgments, were very high for joy, interest, distress-sadness, and surprise, and somewhat lower for bored-sleepy, anger, and fear. The pattern of agreement was similar between and within laboratories. The results provide evidence that untrained judges agree to a remarkable extent on the emotionally patterned signal value of infants' facial expressions.