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Does Infants’ Attachment Relationship Bias Their Neural Processing of Animated Parent-Child Interactions?

Fri, March 22, 3:00 to 4:30pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 3, Room 340

Integrative Statement

Background: Early social-emotional experiences have been found to be reflected in infants’ expectations and attentional processing of social interactions of others (Johnson et al., 2010; Biro et al., 2015). Little is known, however, about the relation between infants’ early interactions with their caregivers and the neurophysiological responses involved in the processing of socially relevant information. In the current study, we investigated the hypothesis that the quality of attachment biases infants’ emotional-motivational brain processes, in particular, the relative hemispheric asymmetry in frontal brain activity, while they observe social interactions. Greater relative right frontal activity is typically associated with “withdrawal” tendencies and the processing of emotions such as sadness and distress, while a greater relative left frontal activity is associated with “approach tendencies” and emotions such as joy and interest.
Method: One-hundred thirty healthy 10-month-old infants participated in the EEG measurement using the 128-electrode EGI net. The infants watched two types of animations that involved two abstract characters, a larger and a smaller one moving together and then separating from each other (see Johnson et al, 2007). The separation was accompanied by a crying sound and ended either with the larger character returning to (“Return”, responsive caregiving) or going further away from (“Leaving”, unresponsive caregiving) the smaller character. The animations were shown in blocks (max 8), each block containing 3 animations with the same type of outcome. Frontal alpha asymmetry (6-9 Hz) was calculated between 11 pairs of frontal electrodes. At 12 months, infants’ attachment was assessed using the Strange Situation Procedure. Usable EEG data and attachment classification were available for 70 infants (32 classified as secure, 21 as insecure and 17 as disorganized). Maternal depression (BDI-II) and infant temperamental difficultness (ICQ) were also assessed to control for their effects as they have previously been shown to be related to infant frontal asymmetry patterns (e.g., Thibodeau et al., 2006).
Results: We found a main effect of difficultness, F(1,61)=8.89, p=.004, ηp2=.13, and a three-way interaction between attachment, type of animation, and difficultness, F(2,122)=5.45, p=.007, ηp2 =.15, on the frontal asymmetry scores. In the Secure group, more difficult infants showed more left-sided (approach-like) asymmetry regardless of the type of animation, p=.008. In the Insecure group, more difficult infants showed a more left-sided, approach-like frontal asymmetry during the Return than during the Leaving animations, p=.01. In Disorganized infants, the opposite pattern was found, p=.05, implying that more difficult infants showed a more left-sided, approach-like asymmetry during the Leaving compared to the Return animations.
Conclusion: These findings suggest that while infants’ neural response involved in emotional-motivational processing of third-party social interactions is associated with their temperament, this relation is qualified by infants’ attachment relationship and it is sensitive to the caregiving response they observed. Frontal asymmetry differences might thus be neurophysiological markers for the intricate interaction between dispositional and environmental factors in infants’ developing “internal working models”.

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