Advances in the Study of Parenting and Infant Emotional Development: Merging Modern and Traditional Measures

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Parents provide the most immediate socialization context, laying the foundation for children’s emerging emotional processing and regulation skills (Eisenberg et al., 1998). Many of the family-level mechanisms determining later adjustment in childhood likely emerge in infancy. Parenting can be a source of stress in this period, as it requires reorganization of roles and boundaries in the family system (Boss, 2002). This period also corresponds to a time when infant emotional neural systems are undergoing rapid, experience-dependent development (Leppänen, 2011). Recent advances in infant-friendly experimental methods allow for a more nuanced measurement, as well as an enhanced understanding of how infants’ emotional development unfolds in the context of the developing parent.

This symposium brings together the most recent evidence from eye-tracking paradigms and well-established observational paradigms measuring infant and parent behavior to address the relations among parenting, child temperament, and attention. Presentation 1 explores associations among 6- to 18-month-old infants’ attention bias to threat, parent attention bias to threat, parental anxiety, and infant temperament, revealing a direct link between parent and infant attention biases. Presentation 2 uses a person-centered approach to investigate stability of parenting risk profiles over time and whether profiles relate to infant attention biases and temperament. Extending to observed parenting behaviors, Presentation 3 uses a diverse sample of mother-toddler dyads to demonstrate that when mothers have higher anxiety, higher maternal sensitivity is associated with less toddler negative affect. The importance of assessing multiple dimensions of parenting risk to investigate infant development will be discussed, along with policy implications.

Sub Unit

• Social, Emotional, Personality

Chair

• Leigha Alexandra MacNeill, Northwestern University

Discussant

• Koraly Elisa Perez-Edgar, Pennsylvania State University, University Park

Individual Presentations

• Attention Biases to Threat in Infants and Parents: Links to Parental and Infant Anxiety Dispositions - Presenting Author: Evin Aktar, Leiden University; Non-Presenting Author: Cosima Nimphy, Universiteit Leiden; Non-Presenting Author: Mariska E. Kret, Leiden University; Non-Presenting Author: Koraly Elisa Perez-Edgar, Pennsylvania State University, University Park; Non-Presenting Author: Maartje Raijmakers, University of Amsterdam; Non-Presenting Author: Susan Bögels, University of Amsterdam

• Profiles of Parenting Risk Predict Infant Temperament and Attention to Threat: An Eye-Tracking Study - Presenting Author: Leigha Alexandra MacNeill, Northwestern University; Non-Presenting Author: Kelley E Gunther, Yale University; Non-Presenting Author: Kristin A. Buss, Pennsylvania State University, University Park; Non-Presenting Author: Vanessa Lobue, Rutgers University; Non-Presenting Author: Koraly Elisa Perez-Edgar, Pennsylvania State University, University Park

• Associations Between Maternal Anxiety, Parenting Behavior, and Negative Emotionality in Toddlers - Presenting Author: Bharathi Jayanthi Zvara, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Non-Presenting Author: Sarah Keim, The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital; Non-Presenting Author: Rebecca R. Andridge, The Ohio State University; Non-Presenting Author: Sarah Anderson, The Ohio State University