Poster #67 - Emotional Responses to Food Among 6-month Infants

• In Event: Poster Session 14

Abstract

Food neophobia is the tendency to reject unfamiliar foods (Cooke et al., 2007; it typically emerges at six months (Doub et al., 2015). When introducing new foods, parents may use emotional signals such as distaste and crying to determine whether infants like or have enough food (Shloim et al., 2018). Thus, understanding infants’ emotional reactions to foods is important for parents, as it may influence their feeding decisions (Forestell & Mennella, 2012). Although prior studies have found associations between infant food rejection and other individual differences (e.g., temperament; Moding et al., 2014), studies often do not provide descriptive data to illuminate how often these behaviors occur at all. The current study examines negative emotional responses to familiar and unfamiliar foods among 6-month-old infants and provides descriptive data on the extent to which these behaviors occur. Moreover, prior research is often conducted in lab settings, leaving a major gap in the literature in terms of studying infant eating at home, where it typically occurs.

Parents in a longitudinal study of eating in infancy were instructed to record typical mealtimes at home where they offered their 6-month-old infants one familiar and one unfamiliar food (one food per video). The first and last minute of each feeding was coded to capture initial food rejection vs. satiety (see also Hodges et al., 2013). The first minute of the feeding is defined as when the parent first brings the food to the infant’s mouth; coders were instructed to code for one minute after that point as the first interval. The end of the feeding was defined as the last feeding attempt made by parents; coders were instructed to code for one minute before that point as the second interval. Negative emotional food responses were rated on a 1 (not at all) to 5 (extremely) scale based on the extent of infant distress observed in the video segments. Coding is complete; preliminary data are included here.

We hypothesized that infants will exhibit more negative emotional responses for unfamiliar foods compared to familiar foods. The frequency of the average emotional responses scores for familiar and unfamiliar food are displayed in Figure 1. We observed similar emotional response scores for familiar and unfamiliar food, t(128.25) = 1.39, p = 0.16. Overall, we observed very few overt negative emotional reactions in home feeding contexts. The current study helps us to gain more understanding about infant emotional responses to food in the home setting, which may differ from reactions in lab settings in important ways.

Authors

• Cherish Li, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Presenting Author

• Jasmine M. DeJesus, University of North Carolina at Greensboro