Using mobile eye-tracking technology to examine adolescent daughters' attention to maternal affect during a conflict...

Attention to socio-emotional stimuli (i.e., affect-biased attention) is an integral component of emotion regulation and human communication. Given the strong link between maternal affect and adolescent behavior, maternal affect may be a critical influence on adolescent affect-biased attention during mother-child interaction. However, prior methodological constraints have precluded fine-grained examinations of factors such as maternal affect on adolescent attention during real-world social interaction. Therefore, this pilot study capitalized on previously validated technological advances by using mobile eye-tracking and facial affect coding software to quantify the influence of maternal affect on adolescents' attention to the mother during a conflict discussion. Results from 7,500 to 9,000 time points sampled for each mother-daughter dyad (n = 28) indicated that both negative and positive maternal affect, relative to neutral, elicited more adolescent attentional avoidance of the mother (ORs = 2.68-9.20), suggesting that typically developing adolescents may seek to avoid focusing on maternal affect of either valence during a conflict discussion. By examining the moment-to-moment association between in vivo displays of maternal affect and subsequent adolescent attention toward the mother's face, these results provide preliminary evidence that maternal affect moderates adolescent attention. Our findings are consistent with cross-species approach-avoidance models suggesting that offspring respond to affectively charged conversations with greater behavioral avoidance or deference.