Poster #10 - The Impact of Prolonged Parental Anxiety on Infant Latency to Emotion

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Attention, Learning, Memory

Integrative Statement

Previous research has suggested that attention biases to threat develop in early infancy (Peltola et al., 2013). Attention bias to threat, particularly when coupled with temperamental fearfulness, is considered one of the earliest predictors of anxiety disorders in adolescence (Pérez-Edgar et al., 2010). However, there is an evident gap in studies examining the processes that underlie the development of attention bias to emotions, both positive and negative. Early attention bias may be sensitive to individual differences in parent-child interactions. Maternal anxiety is a core risk factor for anxiety in adolescence, and a predictor of attention bias to threat in early infancy (Morales et al., 2017).

Much of the emerging literature has highlighted the role of attention bias to threat. However, the role of attention to positively valenced stimuli has also been linked to anxiety. In children and adolescents, some studies report bias towards happy faces with anxiety (Bar-Haim et al, 2011) while others show no bias to happy faces in healthy or anxious groups (Waters et al, 2010; Lindstrom et al, 2009). Further, other studies suggest a bias towards happy faces in both anxious and non-anxious groups (Bar-Haim, 2010) further complicating these findings. These inconsistencies become challenging to resolve in the absence of sufficient data, particularly at its earliest emergence.

This study aims to investigate the impact of parental anxiety on infant looking patterns across the first eight months of life. Infants were shown a passive viewing visual search task, with various faces (neutral, happy, angry) presented one at a time, each appearing in one of the four corners of a screen. Eye-tracking measured infants’ latency to look to the faces. The same task was administered at 4-months (N=57) and 8-months (N=48). The Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI; Beck, 1998) was utilized to measure parental anxiety.

At four months, no significant correlations were evident between parental anxiety and infant looking to emotional faces. At eight months, infants’ latency to fixate happy faces was positively correlated with parental anxiety (r=.36, p=.02). These results indicate that infants of parents with higher anxiety took longer to detect the positive faces in the environment.

Our results suggest a positive association between attention patterns to positive stimuli (happy faces) and parental anxiety. This relation was only significant at 8 months, suggesting that the impact of prolonged exposure to parental anxiety may accumulate across the first eight months, transmitted through variations in parenting behavior, direct observation of parental responses to the environment, or developmentally more stable patterns of attention. These results also reflect earlier research suggesting that the association between infant attention patterns and parental anxiety emerges between the ages of 5-7 months (Peltola, 2009). Additionally, previous data suggest that parental mood is associated with reduced parental emotional expression and attention to infant cues (Aktar, 2017). Most children may also become increasingly attuned to facial expressions that are relatively more frequent in their environment, thus these early parental experiences may help shape the development of attention to faces.

Authors

• Elveena Fareedi, The Pennsylvania State University
  Presenting Author

• Jessica L. Burris, Rutgers University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Denise Oleas, Rutgers University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Koraly Perez-Edgar, The Pennsylvania State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kristin A Buss, The Pennsylvania State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Vanessa LoBue, Rutgers University
  Non-Presenting Author