Young infants see saliva sharing as a sign of a close bond, experiments suggest
Imagine you're an infant. Just a few months in the world, trying to gather your faculties, testing gravity—you're pretty helpless and fully reliant on the people around you. As a result, one of your primary tasks as a new person—even before hand-eye coordination and responding to your own name—is to figure out how the people you've just met are connected to each other.
Infants aged 4 to 6 months can infer social closeness based on shared saliva, according to experiments conducted by researchers at UC Santa Barbara, Harvard University, and MIT. These findings, published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, suggest that young infants are capable of understanding social relationships and anticipating others' emotions.
In the experiments, infants looked longer at the person who shared saliva with a distressed actor compared to those who shared objects or touched foreheads. This implies that even at this early age, infants are making abstract inferences about relationships and social dynamics.
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