Facial Expression as an Access to Newborn's Consciousness.

Abstract

This paper considers the use of expressive movements as indicators of subjective states in the newborn baby. Records of newborns5 reactions to nociceptive and to olfactory and gustatory stimuli (cry and facial expressions of pleasure and displeasure) are analysed as evidences of syntony with the environment and individual variability - two conditions implied in the meaning of consciousness as “awareness” - and exclude the interpretation of these movements as reflex reactions. Since the baby is recognized as a social and an intensely communicative being, these evidences allow the admission of a strict correspondence between expressive movements and internal states, a common assumption of emotion theories.