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Updated: Jun 16, 2026

Gaze in Action: Head-mounted Eye Tracking of Children's Dynamic Visual Attention During Naturalistic Behavior
Published on: November 14, 2018
Dynamic infant-parent affect coupling during the face-to-face/still-face
Sy-Miin Chow1, John D Haltigan, Daniel S Messinger
1Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3270, USA. symiin@email.unc.edu
Abstract:
We examined dynamic infant-parent affect coupling using the Face-to-Face/Still-Face (FFSF). The sample included 20 infants whose older siblings had been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD-sibs) and 18 infants with comparison siblings (COMP-sibs). A series of mixed effects bivariate autoregressive models was used to represent the self-regulation and interactive dynamics of infants and parents during the FFSF. Significant bidirectional affective coupling was found between infants and parents, with infant-to-parent coupling being more prominent than parent-to-infant coupling. Further analysis of within-dyad dynamics revealed ongoing changes in concurrent infant-parent linkages both within and between different FFSF episodes. The importance of considering both inter- and intradyad differences is discussed.
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