Mother's engagement with infant linked to infant's responding to threat

Abstract

The early development of threat perception in infancy might be dependent on caregiver context, but this link has not yet been studied in human infants. This study examined the emergence of the young infant's response to threat in the context of variations in caregiving behavior. Eighty infant‐caregiver dyads (39 female infants, all of western European descent) visited the laboratory when the infant was 5 months old. Each dyad completed a free‐play task, from which we coded for the mother's level of engagement: the amount of talking, close proximity, positive affect, and attention directed toward the infant. When the infant was 7 months old, they came back to the laboratory and we used functional near infrared spectroscopy and eye tracking to measure infants’ neural and attentional responses to threatening angry faces. In response to threat, infants of more‐engaged mothers showed increased brain responses in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex—a brain region associated with emotion regulation and cognitive control among adults—and reduced attentional avoidance. These results point to a role for caregiver behavioral context in the early development of brain systems involved in human threat responding.

The human fear paradox: Affective origins of cooperative care

“…From an empirical perspective, however, it is important to mention that infants' responding to fearful faces selectively predicted their cooperative behavior even when controlling for positive maternal engagement measured during dyadic interactions , suggesting that the link between fearful face processing and cooperative behavior exists independent of positive maternal engagement. In fact, recent research suggests that positive maternal engagement only affects infants' brain responses to angry facial expressions, signaling direct threat, but did not affect infants' responses to fearful or happy facial expressions (Thrasher, Krol, & Grossmann, 2021).…”

Less attention to emotional faces is associated with low empathy and prosociality in 12‐to 20‐month old infants

“…Specifically, Engagement was the TTFF to the emotional face in the periphery when the neutral face was in the center, and Disengagement was the TTFF to the peripheral neutral face when the emotional face was in the center. The comparison to neutral face stimuli is consistent with the approach frequently taken in the eye tracking literature on infant emotion processing (e.g., Thrasher et al, 2021;Vallorani et al, 2021). To calculate the bias scores, first, Engagement and Disengagement average TTFF measures were z-scored within each infant.…”

Extending and refining the fearful ape hypothesis

“…From an empirical perspective, however, it is important to mention that infants' responding to fearful faces selectively predicted their cooperative behavior even when controlling for positive maternal engagement measured during dyadic interactions (Grossmann et al, 2018), suggesting that the link between fearful face processing and cooperative behavior exists independent of positive maternal engagement. In fact, recent research suggests that positive maternal engagement only affects infants' brain responses to angry facial expressions, signaling direct threat, but did not affect infants' responses to fearful or happy facial expressions (Thrasher, Krol, & Grossmann, 2021).…”