Relations between Maternal Stress and Attention to Emotion in Infancy
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to examine the connection between infant attention to emotional faces and maternal stress associated with environmental factors. As an initial test, the study explores maternal stress with self-reported characteristics of their environment. We examined infants' emotional attention to angry, happy, and neutral faces captured via eye tracking at 4-, 8-, 12-, and 18- months. The data indicate that there were no significant effects independently due to emotion or stress at the younger ages of 4 or 8 months. However, by 12 months, infants with high stress mothers spent more time looking at the faces, across emotions. In addition, across the sample, infants spent less time looking at neutral faces, relative to happy and angry faces. At 18 months, infants looked the most at angry faces, versus happy and neutral. Over time, there is more attention specifically to angry faces. Follow up work will need to examine infants at a larger scale and across more trajectories to refine the potential relation between maternal stress and attention to emotion in infancy.
Full Article
Brown - Maternal Stress and Attention to Emotion