Infant physiological response to the still-face paradigm: Contributions of maternal sensitivity and infants’ early regulatory behavior
Section snippets
The still-face paradigm
The SFP has become a standard laboratory procedure for evaluating infant emotion regulatory strategies and dyadic interactive characteristics by assessing the infant's response to violations of expected social norms. The SFP comprises three episodes: a face-to-face play episode; a still-face episode, during which the caregiver does not respond to the infant while holding a neutral expression; and a reunion episode, when the caregiver resumes interaction with her infant, often with a distressed
Maternal sensitivity and infant behavioral responses during the SFP
In Tronick's (Gianino and Tronick, 1988, Tronick, 2007) Mutual Regulation Model, it is hypothesized that sensitive caregivers, who recognize infant coping signals (e.g., looking away or protesting) during a dyadic interaction, and who respond to them in an appropriate manner, have infants who develop a sense that they can both help to regulate the dyadic exchange and, eventually, themselves. The ultimate goal of early mother–infant face-to-face interactions is to achieve mutual regulation, or a
Infant biobehavioral responses to the SFP
Beyond the role played by maternal sensitivity, the development of emotion regulation is also shaped by infants’ biobehavioral responses to stress (Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004). By the end of their first year, most infants have begun the process of managing their own emotional reactions to their environment, including aspects that can be experienced as stressful. Extant theoretical models (Cole et al., 2004, Fox and Calkins, 2003, Propper and Moore, 2006) posit that the capacity to regulate
The current study
The aim of the present study was to investigate the extent to which observed maternal sensitivity prior to and following distress was related to individual differences in 5-month-old infants’ biobehavioral reactions to, and recovery from, the demands of the SFP. Although one study has examined maternal responsiveness aggregated in both play and reunion (Haley & Stansbury, 2003), no studies that we know of have examined maternal sensitivity during both contexts, nor tried to understand the
Participants
Participants were recruited during their third trimester of pregnancy at local childbirth education classes, hospitals, and public assistance organizations as part of a longitudinal effort to identify psychobiological markers of risk for insensitive or unresponsive parenting (n = 105). Participants were screened using the Screening Scale for Problems in Parenting (SSPP; Avison, Turner, & Noh, 1986) and a 9-item version of the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression scale (CES-D; Radloff,
Preliminary analyses
Prior to conducting our main analyses, we evaluated our central variables for demographic effects to determine whether covariates would be needed. The means and standard deviations of all variables tested are presented in Table 1. There were no significant associations between maternal sensitivity (observed during play or reunion), infant physiology, and infant behavior during the SFP and demographic variables that comprised maternal age, household income, ethnicity, marital status, child age,
Discussion
Research has established that social regulation processes, particularly parent-infant interaction patterns during times of stress, and infants’ own coping behaviors, typically attending to a caregiver early in life, are associated with infants’ psycho-physiological functioning (Tronick, 2007). Less clear at this point, however, is the relative importance of these two factors, which may vary in salience depending on the nature of the infants’ stressful experiences, the developmental state of the
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the National Institutes of Mental Health grant 1 R03MH068692-01A1, the Associate Dean of Natural Sciences, University of Oregon, Discretionary Funds Award, the Oregon Community Credit Union Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation, BCS-Social Psychology Program all awarded to the second author. We also would like to express our gratitude to the research assistants who worked on this project, as well as to the mothers and babies who participated in this
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