The first emotions a baby feels are pleasure and displeasure, present from the very first weeks of life. These two broad states form the foundation of all emotional development. A newborn doesn’t arrive with a complex inner world of joy, fear, or sadness, but they do experience a basic sense of “this feels good” or “this feels bad” that drives nearly everything they do.
Pleasure and Displeasure From Day One
Researchers studying infant emotion have found that newborns in their first month operate along a simple emotional spectrum: approach or withdrawal. When something feels right, like the warmth of skin contact, the sound of a familiar voice, or a full stomach, a baby moves toward it, stays calm, and gazes at it. When something feels wrong, like hunger, a cold room, or pain, the baby pulls away, tenses up, and cries. These aren’t yet the refined emotions adults experience, but they are real feeling states that shape how a baby interacts with the world from the moment they’re born.
Displeasure tends to be more visible than pleasure in the earliest days. When a newborn’s needs are urgent, whether from hunger or pain, they communicate through screaming, whimpering, and desperate body language. Pain cries, for instance, start as a high-pitched, intense wail followed by very loud sustained crying. These signals aren’t just reflexes. They represent genuine distress, complete with measurable changes in heart rate and stress hormone levels.
Interest: The Quiet First Emotion
While distress gets the most attention (literally), one of the earliest and most overlooked emotions in newborns is interest. From birth, babies show clear signs of being drawn to certain things over others. They fixate on faces, track moving objects, and respond to the pitch and rhythm of human speech. Newborns born at or after 29 weeks of gestational age already show a preference for the exaggerated, high-pitched style of speech that adults naturally use with babies. This preference shows up as increased visual attention, heightened alertness, and even a measurable decrease in heart rate, which is the body’s way of saying “I’m paying attention.”
Researchers who study infant facial expressions have cataloged the specific muscle movements that signal interest. A baby’s brows may raise or draw slightly together, their eyes widen or take on a round appearance, and their mouth relaxes open, sometimes with the tongue extended. There are at least 22 distinct combinations of facial movements that qualify as interest expressions in newborns. This is a surprisingly rich emotional signal for a brain that’s only days or weeks old, and it tells us that babies aren’t just passively receiving the world. They’re actively engaged with it.
Early Smiles and What They Mean
Parents often notice smiles in the first few days of life, and it’s natural to interpret them as happiness. But those earliest smiles are reflexive, something the body does involuntarily, often during sleep. They don’t yet reflect an internal emotional state the way a smile does in an older baby or adult.
The shift happens around eight weeks. By about two months of age, babies begin producing social smiles: real, intentional responses to something that catches their attention, like a parent’s face or voice. The facial mechanics of genuine joy are specific. The cheeks rise, the corners of the mouth pull back and upward, while the brows stay in their natural resting position. Before this milestone, newborns do experiment with grins and grimaces, but these early expressions are more like rehearsals. By the second month, they start turning into authentic signals of pleasure and friendliness.
When More Complex Emotions Appear
The two-state system of pleasure and displeasure doesn’t last long. Over the first year, these broad categories break apart into more specific emotions. By three to four months, babies show recognizable expressions of joy, anger, surprise, and sadness. These aren’t just variations on “feels good” and “feels bad” anymore. They’re distinct emotional responses with their own facial signatures, body language, and triggers.
Sadness, for example, has a very specific look even in young infants. The inner corners of the brows raise into a triangular shape, vertical wrinkles appear between them, the eyes squint with raised cheeks, and the corners of the mouth pull downward and outward. Researchers have also identified blended expressions, like interest mixed with sadness, where the curious open mouth of interest combines with the furrowed, triangular brows of distress. These blends suggest that even before babies can speak, their emotional lives are becoming layered.
The really complex emotions, the ones that require a sense of self, take much longer to develop. Shame, guilt, embarrassment, and pride don’t typically appear until the second or third year of life. These emotions require a child to understand that other people have expectations and that their own behavior can meet or fall short of those expectations. A newborn simply doesn’t have the cognitive architecture for that yet.
How Babies Communicate What They Feel
Since babies can’t describe their emotions, they rely entirely on their faces, voices, and bodies. Crying is the most powerful tool in the newborn toolkit, and different types of distress produce acoustically different cries. Pain cries are high-pitched and intense from the start. Hunger cries tend to build more gradually and have a rhythmic, repetitive quality. Parents often report learning to distinguish these cries within the first few weeks, though the differences are subtle and don’t always follow neat categories.
Beyond crying, babies communicate through gaze. Looking toward something signals interest and approach. Looking away, especially combined with fussing or arching the back, signals overwhelm or displeasure. These behaviors are consistent enough that researchers have built entire coding systems around them, mapping dozens of facial muscle combinations to specific emotional states. The fact that these systems work reliably on newborns tells us something important: babies aren’t emotionally blank. They arrive with a basic but functional emotional vocabulary, and they use it from the very first day.