Poster #4 - Mother-Infant Interaction at 8 Months Associates with Child’s Engagement with Faces at Preschool Age

• In Event: Poster Session 19

Abstract

Introduction: Prioritized attention to faces over non-face objects is a key aspect of human visual behavior and can be viewed as an early marker of social engagement. Individual differences in attention to faces in infancy predict spontaneous prosocial behaviors in toddlerhood and preschool years (Bedford et al., 2015; Grossmann et al., 2018; Peltola et al., 2018). Little is known about factors that lead to these individual differences in engagement with faces and social environment. The aim of this study was to examine the impact of mother-child interaction during early childhood on the development of social engagement (i.e., attention towards faces in an eye-tracking experiment) at preschool age.

Participants: This study is part of multidisciplinary longitudinal FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study (Karlsson et al., 2018). Participants of this study were 85 mother-child dyads, who had complete interaction data and eye-tracking data.

Methods: Emotional Availability Scales (EAS; Biringen, 2008) were used to examine maternal sensitivity, structuring, non-hostility and non-intrusiveness, and child’s responsiveness and involvement during a video recorded free-play interaction situation at the child’s age of 8 and 30 months. Child’s engagement with faces was assessed with eye-tracking combined with spatial overlap task (Peltola et al., 2008), which was used to define face bias (i.e., the probability of gaze disengagement from happy/neutral faces adjusted for the probability of disengagement from non-face patterns) at the child’s age of 8, 30 and 60 months.

Results: Preliminary correlations showed that increased maternal structuring at 8 months was related to increased face bias at 60 months (r = .20, p = .066), whereas higher non-hostility was related to reduced face bias at 60 months (r = -.21, p = .057). Child’s involvement (r = .31, p = .004) and responsiveness (r = .21, p = .057) at 8 months were positively related to increased face bias at 60 months. Preliminary linear regression models showed that even after controlling for child sex, maternal education and child face bias at 8 months, maternal structuring (B = .046, SE = .022, p = .038) and non-hostility (B = -.065, SE = .032, p = .048), as well as child’s involvement (B = .051, SE = .019, p = .011) at 8 months associated with child’s face bias at 60 months.

Implications: Our findings give preliminary support for associations between mother-infant interaction and child’s engagement with faces later in early childhood. While our recent cross-sectional study (Eskola et al., under review) found a link between maternal hostility and social-emotional attention in infancy, the current study found this association to remain until preschool age. This suggests that early mother-child interaction might have longitudinal effects on the development of social engagement. In the poster presentation, a more sophisticated structural equation model including also the assessment at 30 months will be presented.

Authors

• Aino Luotola, University of Turku
  Presenting Author

• Eeva-Leena Kataja

• Jukka Leppänen

• Hetti Emilia Hakanen, University of Turku

• Eeva Holmberg

• Elisabeth Nordenswan, Åbo Akademi University

• Eeva Eskola, University of Turku

• Saara Nolvi, University of Turku

• Hasse Karlsson, Turku University Hospital and University of Turku

• Linnea Karlsson, University of Turku

• Riikka Korja, University of Turku