Poster #74 - Infants’ Expectations About Caregivers’ Comforting Behavior at 6, 9 and 12 Months of age

• In Event: Poster Session 20

Abstract

Human infants are born into a complex social world where they interact with others and develop social expectations. Infants as young as 4 months expect adults to provide comfort and care, and these expectations form a “first draft” of social rules that includes how infants interpret and engage in interactions with others (Jin et al., 2018). However, no prior study has explored developmental change in infants’ expectations about comforting behavior. In addition, because caregivers vary in their responses to infant distress, and infants vary in the degree to which they elicit comfort from caregivers, individual differences in infants’ expectations may also emerge. Such individual differences may be particularly salient in later infancy as interaction patterns with caregivers become consolidated. Both caregiver and infant characteristics – including caregiver depressive symptomatology and infant negative emotionality – may contribute to such social interaction patterns and, in turn, infants’ social expectations.

In this study, we will examine developmental change in infants’ expectations about adult comforting behavior and test maternal depression and infant negative emotionality as predictors of individual differences. Mother-infant dyads visited the laboratory playroom at 6, 9 and 12 months. Expectations about comforting behavior were assessed in a violation-of-expectation task, in which the infant viewed a series of video vignettes showing a woman either ignoring or comforting a crying baby (Jin et al., 2018). Ignore and comfort events were counterbalanced across infants and time points. Infants’ looking behavior during familiarization (e.g., woman folding kitchen towels) and test (i.e., ignore, comfort) trials (see Figure 1) are coded frame-by-frame. Expectations about comforting behavior are operationalized as looking longer at ignoring versus comforting events. At 6, 9 and 12 months, mothers also completed the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (Radloff, 1977), and mothers and fathers completed the Infant Behavior Questionnaire (Rothbart, 1981) to measure maternal depression and infant negative emotionality, respectively.

We will use data from 36 infants (19 female) with complete data at 6, 9 and 12 months. We will test a doubly repeated measures one-way ANOVA with infant sex as the between-subjects factor and event (ignore, comfort) and time point (6, 9, 12 months) as the repeated measures to assess developmental change. We will assess two competing hypotheses. First, infants may look longer at the ignore than the comfort event, and such differences will increase over time, reflecting infants’ developing expectations for the caregiver to comfort a crying baby. Inversely, infants may show an aversive response to the ignore event over time (possibly because they remember these events) and look away as soon as they detect them. To assess individual differences, we will test correlations between maternal depressive symptoms/infant negative emotionality and infant looking time at each time point. We expect lower maternal depressive symptoms will be associated with greater expectations about comforting behavior, and such associations will become significantly stronger with age, indicating the emerging importance of early caregiving experiences for infant adaptive social development. Examination of infant negative emotionality will be exploratory, given limited empirical studies on how temperament shapes infants’ social expectations.

Authors

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

• Kyong-Sun Jin, Sungshin Women’s Univeristy

• Renee Baillargeon, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Nancy McElwain, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Seo-woo Kim, Sungshin Women’s University