How babies deal with angry adults!

​Washington: Just as we often form fast opinions about each other's personalities, especially when it comes to negative traits, 15-month-old infants also form similar generalisations about others and make attempts to appease adults they consider prone to anger, a study says.

The researchers wanted to see how exposing babies to an unfamiliar adult's anger toward another adult would affect the babies' behavior in a new situation. Do the babies assume that the initial negative encounters would happen again? "We wanted to see if babies would treat the anger they had seen before as a one-off event or whether they see it as being part of the person's character," said lead study author Betty Repacholi from the University of Washington.

"Our research shows that babies are carefully paying attention to the emotional reactions of adults," study co-author Andrew Meltzoff from University of Washington noted."Babies make snap judgments as to whether an adult is anger-prone. They pigeon-hole adults more quickly than we thought," Meltzoff pointed out.

The findings were published in the journal Developmental Psychology. "The babies are 'emotion detectives.' They watch and listen to our emotions, remember how we acted in the past, and use this to predict how we will act in the future. How long these first impressions last is an important question," Meltzoff noted.