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Poster #5 - Factors Influencing Infant Attention to Emotion Shift from Temperament at 4-Months to Environment at 8-Months

Sat, March 23, 4:15 to 5:30pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Several studies have documented that infants, children, and adults demonstrate biased attention to emotional stimuli, detecting the presence of negative or threatening stimuli more quickly than benign or neutral displays (see LoBue & Rakison, 2013 for a review). Further research has shown that both temperamental and environmental factors are related to attention biases to threat (Burris et al., 2017), and that these biases are particularly strong in individuals with specific phobias or clinical anxiety (Cisler & Koster, 2010). This suggests that attention biases for emotionally valenced stimuli can develop or change on the basis of both individual differences and experiences. However, because of the lack of longitudinal data in infants, it is still unclear when attention biases for emotional stimuli first develop, and how the environment might help shape these biases with age.

Here we used data from an on-going longitudinal study of infants at 4 (n=50) and 8 (n=43) months of age to examine patterns of looking behavior to emotional faces across the first few months of life as markers for attention bias to emotional stimuli. In particular, we focused on patterns infant temperament and maternal environmental stress, as both have been hypothesized to relate to attention bias to threat. We used a passive viewing vigilance task with eye-tracking, in which infants’ attention was directed to the center of the screen, followed by a face (neutral, angry, happy) that appeared at one of the four corners. We measured infants’ latency to fixate each target face. To measure child temperament, parents completed the Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ), and as a measure of environmental stress, they also completed the Daily Hassles Questionnaire (Cronic & Greenberg, 1990), and the ICPSR Community Survey Questionnaire (Earls, 2013).

We found that at 4 months of age, temperamental factors, as measured by multiple subscales (Activity, Smiling, Vocal, Surgency) on the IBQ questionnaire, were significantly correlated with latency to detect both happy and neutral faces (all r’s>-.27, all p’s<.05). However, at 8 months, temperament was no longer significantly related to latency to detect any of the facial expressions. Instead, infants’ latency to detect positive faces at 8 months was significantly correlated to negative factors in the environment, including the frequency of everyday hassles, and community activism and thefts as measured by Daily Hassles Questionnaire and the Community Survey questionnaire, respectively (all r’s >-.31, all p’s <.05). In other words, while the strongest predictor of detecting emotional faces at 4 months was infant temperament, by 8 months of age, infants with higher levels of violence and stress in their environment were the slowest to detect positive faces.

While data collection is ongoing, these preliminary findings suggest that the environment helps shape emotional facial processing very early in development.

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