HGSE Postdoctoral Student Receives WAIMH New Investigator Award

The World Association for Infant Mental Health (WAIMH) announced HGSE postdoctoral student Claire Vallotton as the winner of the 2006 New Investigator Award for her research recognizing infants ability to communicate emotions through nonverbal signs.

"This is the first acknowledgement I've received for my research at the field level so this feels significant to me," Vallotton says. "I'm very delighted and honored."

Vallotton is attending HGSE on a three-year postdoctoral fellowship from the National Institute of Health (NIH). She is working closely with Bigelow Professor Kurt Fisher and Associate Professor Catherine Ayoub to study early language and social development. In addition, she is studying signs and gesture behavior in correlation to early social behavior and emotional skills. Also, she is studying infants' signs and gestures and how they impact language development and social skills.

"[Vallotton] is a really extraordinary researcher and colleague," Ayoub says. "She has done a superb job at University of California at Davis and now as the NIH postdoctoral fellowship, which is one of the toughest to get at Harvard. She's in process of doing wonderful work with us. We are very lucky she was interested in coming to Harvard for her postdoctoral fellowship. Kurt and I are so happy to be working with her."

The WAIMH New Investigator Award recognizes promising and encouraging new investigators in the field of infant mental health. Vallotton will travel to Paris this summer to receive the award at the semiannual WAIMH conference. As a result of the award, her research entitled "Signs of Emotion" will be published later this year in the Journal of Infant Mental Health. In addition, as winner of this award, Vallotton is invited to speak at the 2008 WAIMH conference in Japan.

Vallotton's research discovered that infants can communicate emotions through sign language as early as six months old. Previously, the early childhood field reportedly believed that children did not have the ability to name, talk, or think about internal states such as emotions and feelings.

"No one had looked at the full extent of what infants can communicate through signs, but more of what is said about in language development," Vallotton says regarding infant's mental health research.

She spent eight months observing and documenting infants between the ages of six- and 18-months use signs to talk about internal states, to have conversations with their caregivers about their emotions, and to communicate with other children.

Vallotton explains that infants can show emotion through signs like tracing their finger down their cheek to denote sadness or by patting their chest to show being scared.

"We've studied young children's ability to communicate about their emotions once they start to talk," Vallotton says. "The entire field is looking at children's internal state, but doesn't give them credit until they are age three or four. It is hard to understand the internal state without having words so this research breaks the language barrier to investigate what children understand prior to the onset of verbal language."