Infants’ Temperament and Mothers’, and Fathers’ Depression Predict Infants’ Attention to Objects Paired with Emotional Faces

Abstract

Between 10 and 14 months, infants gain the ability to learn about unfamiliar stimuli by observing others’ emotional reactions to those stimuli, so called social referencing (SR). Joint processing of emotion and head/gaze direction is essential for SR. This study tested emotion and head/gaze direction effects on infants’ attention via pupillometry in the period following the emergence of SR. Pupil responses of 14-to-17-month-old infants (N = 57) were measured during computerized presentations of unfamiliar objects alone, before-and-after being paired with emotional (happy, sad, fearful vs. neutral) faces gazing towards (vs. away) from objects. Additionally, the associations of infants’ temperament, and parents’ negative affect/depression/anxiety with infants’ pupil responses were explored. Both mothers and fathers of participating infants completed questionnaires about their negative affect, depression and anxiety symptoms and their infants’ negative temperament. Infants allocated more attention (larger pupils) to negative vs. neutral faces when the faces were presented alone, while they allocated less attention to objects paired with emotional vs. neutral faces independent of head/gaze direction. Sad (but not fearful) temperament predicted more attention to emotional faces. Infants’ sad temperament moderated the associations of mothers’ depression (but not anxiety) with infants’ attention to objects. Maternal depression predicted more attention to objects paired with emotional expressions in infants low in sad temperament, while it predicted less attention in infants high in sad temperament. Fathers’ depression (but not anxiety) predicted more attention to objects paired with emotional expressions independent of infants’ temperament. We conclude that infants’ own temperamental dispositions for sadness, and their exposure to mothers’ and fathers’ depressed moods may influence infants’ attention to emotion-object associations in social learning contexts.

Parental negative emotions are related to behavioral and pupillary correlates of infants’ attention to facial expressions of emotion

“…Based on previous evidence in adults (Bradley et al, 2008), and in infants (Gredebäck et al, 2012), we expected more pupil dilation in response to negative (vs. neutral) stimuli. In the light of earlier findings on the links between infants' attention to emotional expressions, and parents' negative emotion, depression, anxiety and infants' negative temperament (Aktar et al, 2016;De Haan et al, 2004;Martinos et al, 2012), we expected significant positive associations between infants' attention to facial expressions and parents' negative emotions, and between infants' attention to faces and infant negative temperament. We also explored the moderating role of infant negative temperament for the first time for fathers' together with mothers' negative emotions using both fixations and pupil dilation as outcomes in the current design.…”

“…In turn, all infants more often fixated on fearful than happy or neutral faces. Aktar et al (2016) reported more pupil dilation to 1 s presentation of fearful and sad facial expressions in 14-to-17-month-olds. In contrast to these studies, Jessen et al (2016) recently showed a positivity bias in pupillary responses and fixations: infants had more dilated pupils and longer fixations to happy than to fearful expressions.…”

“…Parents' negative affect, did not significantly predict 7-month-olds ERP responses or attention to fearful (vs. happy) faces, neither alone, nor in interaction with child fearful temperament in this study. Second, Aktar and colleagues (Aktar et al, 2016) found that infants with higher levels of sad temperament show more pupillary arousal to negative and positive (vs. neutral) facial expressions. This study also tested the links between parents' anxiety/ depression/ negative affect and child attention to emotional facial expressions, and the moderation of these links by temperament, but these were not significantly linked to infants' attention.…”

Dysfunctional gaze processing in bipolar disorder

“…Additionally, gaze direction activates brain regions associated with emotional face processing, such as the amygdala and the fusiform gyrus ( Adams et al, 2003 , George et al, 2001 ; and see Itier and Batty, 2009 ). Humans present a sensitivity to gaze direction from the earliest days of life ( Farroni et al, 2002 ), and eye gaze interaction offers cognitive and affective learning opportunities ( Lotzin et al, 2016 , Lotzin et al, 2015 , Stern, 1974 , Tronick and Reck, 2009 ), and influences the development of emotion-regulation strategies ( Aktar et al, 2016 , Luoma et al, 2013 , Möller et al, 2014 ). To the best of our knowledge, no previous work has investigated the neural correlates of gaze perception in BP.…”

Association of maternal depression with dietary intake, growth, and development of preterm infants: a cohort study in Beijing, China

“…For example, previous studies [8,32] have shown that depressed mothers provide less cognitive stimulation and less interaction to their infants than non-depressed mothers. Aktar et al [33] suggested that maternal depression might affect infants' attention to emotion-object associations in social learning contexts. Perra et al [34] found an association between maternal postnatal depression and later cognitive development.…”