Faces and facial expressions have a special power over us as human beings. While friendly faces make us feel warm and fuzzy, those of our opponents evoke fear or even anger. So, when do we as kids learn to recognize faces and facial expressions? And what lessons can be learned by parents whose facial signals carry a massive amount of information for infants? As a researcher primarily interested in emotional development, I’ve spent years studying how infants and children come to recognize faces and emotional facial expressions. Newborns show a distinct preference for the faces of their mothers, only hours after they are born. The Importance of Faces for Children Decades of research from many different labs suggest that faces are quite special for infants right from birth. To demonstrate this, researchers showed newborns who were only nine minutes old paddles that contained the image of a face or the …