Mother-Infant Microtemporal Processes During Play Contribute to Infant Affective Engagement Following a Stressor

• In Event: Poster Session 05
  In Poster Session: PS 05 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

More positive mother-infant dyadic processes (e.g., matching of positive states, quick reparation from mismatching states) during face-to-face interactions may facilitate infant emotion regulation. Studies that employed the Still-Face Paradigm (SFP) to assess such dyadic processes found that more mother-infant matching of positive engagement and shorter latency to repair during play may foster infant recovery during reunion (e.g., Noe et al., 2015; Müller et al., 2015). In addition, with the rapid development of infant’s sense-perception and socioemotional abilities, the dynamics of mother-infant interaction may change considerably during the first year (e.g., Nomikou et al., 2016), warranting examination of above associations using repeated-measures. Taken together, the current study examined the associations between mother-infant microtemporal matching of positive engagement and reparation during SFP play and infant positive and negative engagement during SFP reunion at 3, 6, and 9 months.
Participants were 102 mother-infant dyads (45 girls; mothers were 71% European American). At 3, 6, and 9 months, mother-infant interactions were video-recorded during the SFP, which included three 2-min episodes (play, still-face, and reunion). Coding of mothers’ and infants’ facial expressions, vocalizations, and direction of gaze were assessed on a frame-by-frame (33ms/frame) basis. Based on Tronick et al. (2005), we defined two mother-infant dyadic processes (i.e., positive matching and mismatching, see Table 1 for details) from our microbehavioral coding during the play episode, and computed the following scores: (a) proportion of positive matching, calculated as the total time of positive matching in play divided by the length of the episode, and (b) latency to repair, calculated as the average mismatching duration in seconds. Additionally, proportions of infant negative and positive engagement (see Table 1) were calculated for the still-face and reunion episodes.
Partial correlations, controlling for proportion of infant negative engagement during the still-face episode, revealed that dyadic processes during play were related to infant engagement during reunion concurrently (see Table 2). More positive matching during play was associated with more infant positive engagement during reunion at 3, 6 and 9 months, and was associated with less negative engagement at 9 months. Shorter latency to repair during play was associated with more positive engagement at 6 months and less negative engagement at 6 and 9 months during reunion.
Consistent with our hypotheses, findings indicate that more positive matching and quicker reparation during play were related to better infant recovery from experiencing an emotional separation from the mother as operationalized in the still face episode. By examining the associations between dyadic processes and infant engagement at 3, 6 and 9 months, this study extends the literature by illuminating developmental change in these associations. Specifically, positive matching appears to predict infant positive engagement with mother during reunion at all ages, but only contributes to less negative engagement toward the end of the first year. Likewise, latency to repair does not predict infant engagement until the second half of the first year. These findings suggest that the influence of dyadic processes on infant engagement following a stressor may increase over the first year of life.

Authors

• Yannan Hu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Presenting Author

• Nancy McElwain, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Non-Presenting Author

• Xiaomei Li, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Non-Presenting Author