Beyond the Familial: The Development of Infant Emotional Communication with Mothers, Fathers, and Strangers

• In Event: Fathering and Father-Child Relationships

Abstract

In the first months of life, preverbal infants engage in social interactions by temporally coordinating three modalities of emotional communication: gaze direction, facial expressions, and vocalizations (Colonnesi, Zijlstra, van der Zande, & Bögels, 2012; Yale, Messinger, Cobo-Lewis, & Delgado, 2003). Research on infant emotional communication has been focused on mothers, and occasionally fathers, while little is known about infant communication patterns with unfamiliar interaction partners. Yet communication with strangers characterizes social interactions from infancy onwards. When interacting with an unfamiliar partner, high levels of novelty and uncertainty are involved, such that novel communicative patterns may thus emerge. Along with contextual factors, such as the familiarity with the interactions partner, infants’ individual traits, such as temperament, might contribute as well to the infant emotional communication. Little is known, however, about the association of patterns of infant emotional communication with temperamental characteristics.
The aim of the present longitudinal study was to investigate the development of infant emotional communication with strangers, as compared to mother and father, while examining the role of temperament in conditioning these communicative behaviors. Fifty-eight infants (25 girls) and their parents participated in the study. The adult-infant dyads were observed at age 4 and 8 months during three separate 2-minute face-to-face interactions conducted in the family’s home. Behaviours were coded every second to characterize infants’ gaze and facial expressions (duration in seconds), and vocalizations (onset frequencies). Both mothers and fathers reported on their infant’s temperament (i.e., surgency and negative affectivity) at both ages using the Infant Behaviour Questionnaire-Revised (Putnam, Helbig, Gartstein, Rothbart, & Leerkes, 2014). To investigate the differences across interaction partners over time, while accounting for the nested nature of the repeated measures data, hierarchical models were constructed, with temperament as a time-varying covariate.
Results indicated that infants gazed longer at the stranger than at the father, but exhibited less smiling to the stranger than to the mother, and produced fewer vocalizations with the stranger than with either parent. Higher levels of temperamental negative affectivity were associated with lower durations of gaze and smile, and their co-occurrence, while higher levels of surgency were associated with longer smile duration and higher vocalizations levels. Significant interaction effects indicated that both time and temperament moderated the effects of the interaction partner on the infant behavior patterns of emotional communication. During interactions with fathers, the levels of infant vocalizations – and their temporal co-occurrence with smile, with and without gaze at the partner- increased from 4 to 8 months, reaching significantly higher levels than with the stranger. When interacting with mothers, as compared to strangers, children with higher levels of surgency engaged in longer durations of smile, and their temporal co-occurrence with gaze at the partner or/and vocalizations.
In conclusion, results support the idea that infant communication is modulated by the familiarity with the interaction partner as early as in the first year of life, and the formation of these behavior communicative patterns is predisposed by the infant’s personal traits, such as temperament.

Authors

• Eliala Alice Salvadori, University of Amsterdam
  Presenting Author

• Cristina Colonnesi, University of Amsterdam
  Non-Presenting Author

• Frans Oort, University of Amsterdam
  Non-Presenting Author

• Daniel Messinger, University of Miami
  Non-Presenting Author