Infants’ and parents’ negative emotional dispositions and pupil responses to dynamic negative emotional expressions

• In Event: Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Topic - Biological Processes: Psychophysiology

Abstract

Infants’ emotional development unfolds within the broader context of parental emotion socialization. Specifically, infants' emotion processing skills emerge during the emotional exchanges in every-day parent-infant face-to-face-interactions. Observing others’ emotional expressions during social interactions increases physiological arousal, reflected in dilated pupil sizes (Aston-Jones & Cohen, 2005). Under constant luminance, changes in pupil size are related to autonomic nervous system activity and have been investigated as indices of attention and arousal. Pupillometry has increasingly become a popular method in emotion research with adults and infants, whereas pupil responses to negative emotions have only been explored separately in infant and adult populations. Pupillary reactivity to negative emotional stimuli in children and adults may further reflect individual differences in negative emotional dispositions. For example, more anxiety in adults (Kret Stekelenburg, Roelofs, & De Gelder, 2013) and children (Price et al., 2013) was shown to be related to a stronger pupil dilation to angry facial expressions. Our study compares parents’ and infants’ pupil responses to dynamic negative emotional facial expressions and explores the links of infants’ and parents’ pupil responses to infants’ and parents’ negative emotional dispositions.
The current sample consisted of 222 infants in three age groups: 5-to-7-month-olds (n = 77, Mage = 6.08), 11-to-13-month-olds (n = 78, Mage = 12.08), and 17-to-19-month-olds (n = 67, Mage = 17.87) and one of their parents (n = 229). Infants’ and one parent’s pupil responses to negative (angry, fearful, and sad) versus neutral dynamic expressions were measured in a lab experiment via eye-tracking (Figure 1a). When available, both parents were asked to report their own (depression, anxiety, stress) and their infants’ negative emotional dispositions (temperamental dimensions of sadness, fear, and distress to limitations) using questionnaires.
Pupillary reactions to negative (vs. neutral) facial expressions significantly differed between infants and parents, N = 451, F(3, 15323.28) = 13.82, p < .001. Infants’ pupil responses did not differ between negative versus neutral expressions (N = 222, p = .435), while parents showed stronger pupil responses to the negative than neutral expressions (N = 229, F(3, 10241.90) = 38.20, p < .001; Figure 1b). Moreover, there were significant associations between mothers’ and fathers’ stress levels and their own pupil responses towards angry (β = -.05, SE = .02, p = .027) and fearful (β = -.08, SE = .02, p = <.001) faces, as well as their infants’ pupil responses towards angry (β = .11, SE = .04, p = .004), fearful (β = .09, SE = .04, p = .012), and sad (β = .08, SE = .04, p = .025) faces. We conclude that pupil responses differ between parents and offspring in infancy, and that stress in parents is related to their own and their infants’ pupillary arousal to negative emotion.

Authors

• Cosima Nimphy, Universiteit Leiden
  Presenting Author

• Evin Aktar, Leiden University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Mariska E. Kret, Leiden University
  Non-Presenting Author

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

• Susan Bögels, University of Amsterdam
  Non-Presenting Author

• Maartje Raijmakers, University of Amsterdam
  Non-Presenting Author