Parental perception and interpretation of infant emotions: psychological and physiological processes

Abstract

To study parental experience and perception of infant emotional expressions parents' responses to infant pictures depicting positive, neutral and negative emotions were assessed on the level of affective judgments (perceived and experienced valence and arousal), of mimic responses (facial muscle activity) and of the eyelid reflex (using the startle paradigm). In general, while parents were able to appropriately perceive infant emotions and were clearly affected by them, they exhibited a bias for positive interpretation. This was obvious from their subjective evaluations which, e.g. were more positive for experienced than for perceived valence, as well as from their mimic responses indicating positive responses in general. In addition, infant pictures including the negative ones lead to an inhibition of the startle reflex, indicating a positive evaluation of infant emotions on the sub-cortical level. These effects were most prominent when parents were faced with pictures of their own infants as compared to unfamiliar ones. The way parents process information about infant emotions may facilitate appropriate responsiveness to infants' needs. Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Key words: perception of emotion; startle reflex; mimic responses Infant emotional expression plays an important role for development, because during the first year before the onset of speech and even more during the first months before the up-coming of the first gestures, emotional expression and, most of all, negative emotional expression is the only way for an infant to communicate his/her needs to the caregiver. Thus, infant emotional expression as well as the caregivers' responses are substantial components of infantcaregiver relationship. Because infants are not capable of autonomous

The influence of attachment representation on parental perception and interpretation of infant emotions: A multilevel approach

“…However, the startle modulation could not be induced by using pictures with varying infant emotional expressions so far, both for parents and childless students (Spangler et al, 2001(Spangler et al, , 2005. The current findings suggest that this may not be valid in general, as the missing startle modulation was only found for secure and preoccupied parents, while dismissing parents, when faced with infant emotion pictures, showed a typical startle modulation with increased startle amplitude during negative pictures.…”

“…Whereas the valence-dependent modulation of the startle reflex could be replicated for the usually used standardized IAPS pictures (Center for the Psychophysiological Study of Emotion and Attention, 1994), there was no augmentation of the reflex magnitude through negative infant pictures, although their affective judgments were clearly negative. Similarly, Spangler et al (2005) did not detect an augmentation of the startle reflex in a sample with parents faced with negative infant pictures. These findings indicate specific basic level information processing in adults regarding perception of infant emotions which is different from the perception of other emotional stimuli.…”

“…Familiarity was included to test whether the attachment effects were different when faced with pictures of the own infant as compared to unfamiliar ones. As effects for valence and familiarity have already been reported elsewhere (Spangler et al, 2005), only effects regarding attachment representation, that is, main effects Developmental Psychobiology 1 The three coders were the first author (G.S. ), Peter Zimmermann (P.Z.)…”

“…To warrant an appropriate function of dyadic regulation, caregivers must be able to perceive and appropriately interpret the infants' emotional signals. The major objective of this study was to investigate the relation between attachment representation and perception and interpretation of infant emotions in parents by using a multilevel approach (Spangler, Emlinger, Meinhardt, & Hamm, 2001;Spangler, Geserick, & von Wahlert, 2005).…”

“…According to Spangler and Zimmermann (1999) we expected less differences in the responses to positive and negative infant emotion in dismissing parents. In addition, we hypothesized that the parents' positive bias in the evaluation of infant emotion on the procedural level (described by Spangler et al, 2005) should specifically apply to secure parents, while the evaluation may be less positive or even negative in both the dismissing and the preoccupied ones. Accordingly, we expected a higher activation of the musculus corrugator in the insecure as compared to the secure parents.…”