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Infants' Temperament and Mothers', and Fathers' Depression Predict Infants' Attention to Objects Paired with

Evin Aktar1,2, Dorothy J Mandell3, Wieke de Vente4

  • 1Amsterdam Brain and Cognition, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Achtergracht 129, 1018WS, Amsterdam, Netherlands. E.Aktar@uva.nl.

Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology
|October 9, 2015
PubMed

Insights

Infants learn from emotional cues, but their attention to objects paired with emotions is influenced by their own sadness and parental depression. This impacts social learning.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Infant Social Cognition
  • Emotional Learning

Background:

  • Social referencing (SR) emerges between 10-14 months, enabling infants to learn from others' emotional reactions to novel stimuli.
  • Effective SR relies on the integrated processing of emotional cues and head/gaze direction.
  • Understanding infant attention in the early stages of SR is crucial for developmental research.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the effects of emotional faces and head/gaze direction on infant attention to objects.
  • To explore the relationship between infant temperament, parental mood, and infant attention during social referencing.
  • To examine how parental depression and anxiety influence infants' attention to emotion-object associations.

Main Methods:

  • Pupillometry was used to measure the attention of 57 infants (14-17 months old).
  • Infants viewed unfamiliar objects presented alone and paired with emotional (happy, sad, fearful, neutral) or neutral faces with varying gaze directions.
  • Infant temperament and parental negative affect, depression, and anxiety were assessed via questionnaires.

Main Results:

  • Infants showed greater attention to negative vs. neutral faces alone, but less attention to objects paired with emotional vs. neutral faces.
  • Infants' sad temperament predicted increased attention to emotional faces.
  • Maternal and paternal depression modulated infants' attention to emotion-object associations, with effects varying based on infant temperament.

Conclusions:

  • Infants' innate temperamental sadness influences their attention to emotional cues and object associations.
  • Maternal and paternal depression can significantly impact how infants attend to emotional information in social learning contexts.
  • These findings highlight the interplay between infant disposition and parental mood in shaping early social learning.

Keywords:
EmotionFathersIndividual differencesInfancyPupil dilationTemperament

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