The Emergence of Social Smiling in Mother-Infant Interaction – Ethnotheories and Behavioral Dynamics in two Cultures

• In Event: Parental Emotion Socialization Around the World: A Close Look at Culturally Embedded Guiding Factors

Abstract

Earlier findings suggest that the development of infant smiling critically depends on culturally informed social interaction. However, these studies are all based on two untested assumptions that this presentation directly addresses. The first assumption is that caregivers’ interactional routines around infant smiling can be taken as evidence for caregivers’ ethnotheories about ideal infant affect that organize parental behavior. However, ethnotheories have not been assessed directly, neither their association with caregivers’ behavior during mother-infant interaction. The second assumption is that caregivers’ culturally informed behavior is related to infant smiling, that is, generalizes to infant behavior across developmental time (i.e., age) and contexts (i.e., in interaction with a female experimenter).
In study 1, the first assumption was addressed by assessing caregivers’ ethnotheories in two cultures that were hypothesized to differ in their preferences concerning ideal infant affect, namely mothers from urban middle-class families from Münster and mothers from rural farming families from the Kichwa culture, living in villages in Ecuador. Based on previous findings, we hypothesized that mothers from Münster would have a more pronounced preference for high-arousal positive affect. When their infants were 7 weeks old, mothers (N = 61) were presented 10 pairs of video clips. Each pair showed two clips of the same infant (one Kichwa and one Münster infant) that differed in infant affect (including neutral, low-arousal and high-arousal positive affect). Mothers were asked to choose their preferred target state, which resulted in an ideal affect score, ranging from 0 to 2 (with 2 = preference for intense positive affect), separate for the familiar and unfamiliar infant. In support of this hypothesis, mothers from Münster expressed a stronger preference for positive affect (Ms = 1.87, SDs = 0.35) than Kichwa mothers (Mfamiliar = 1.68, SD = 0.65, Munfamiliar = 1.58, SD = 0.67), F(1,59) = 5.68, p = .020, η² = .09.
In support of the second assumption, the analysis of infant smiling during mother-infant interaction showed that there was a significant increase in the number of infants’ bouts of intense smiling (i.e., affective climaxes) from 9 to 13 weeks in the Münster, but not the Kichwa sample, leading to significant cross-cultural differences at 13 weeks (subsample of Study 1, see Fig. 1). Furthermore, Study 3 focused on whether the effects of parenting generalize across contexts by assessing the still-face effect at postnatal weeks 12 (n = 44) and 18 (n = 47). The guiding assumption was that there should be a universal response to an interruption of social interaction. At the same time, we hypothesized that the effect is more pronounced in Münster infants, given that face-to-face interaction is the preferred format in this culture. Overall, the results support the former, but not the latter hypothesis, showing similar changes in affect (both negative and positive) and gaze across ages and cultures.
Overall, this set of studies shows that parental ethnotheories differ between cultures, which – based on a universal sensitivity for face-to-face interaction – has important consequences for the development of infant smiling during everyday social interaction.

Authors

• Joscha Kärtner, University of Münser
  Presenting Author

• Helen Wefers, University of Münster