Full Length ArticleApproach-avoidance responses to infant facial expressions in nulliparous women: Associations with early experience and mood induction
Introduction
Infant signals are essential in communicating needs and eliciting caregiving reactions in adults (Ainsworth, Bell, & Stayton, 1974; Bowlby, 1969, Soltis, 2004). Infants are fully dependent on their parents and it is therefore likely that specific neurophysiological mechanisms have developed to subserve the perception of infant signals (Esposito, Valenzi, Islam, Mash, & Bornstein, 2015; Kringelbach et al., 2008; Piallini, De Palo, & Simonelli, 2015; Swain et al., 2014, Young et al., 2015). Specifically, facial expressions as well as crying and laughter represent the most powerful ways infants possess in order to communicate their status and to interact with adults. Parents’ ability to properly recognize and respond to these signals is crucial for healthy infant development (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978; Bowlby, 1969; Klein Velderman, Bakermans-Kranenburg, Juffer, & van IJzendoorn, 2006; Van Zeijl et al., 2006), especially in the domain of emotion regulation (Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, & Target, 2002; Rutherford, Wallace, Laurent, & Mayes, 2015). In this study we examined the perception of infants’ emotional expressions in nulliparous women and their effect on approach/avoidance behaviors. The aim of the study was to understand how infant expressions affect adults’ reaction and behavioral response, taking into account two important factors that influence responding to infant emotions: current mood and childhood caregiving experiences.
Infant signals elicit not only caregiving responses, but also evoke physiological arousal in adults, as well as negative emotions. A series of studies showed that infant crying elicits aversion (Frodi, Lamb, Leavitt, & Donovan, 1978; Groh and Roisman, 2009, Groh et al., 2015; Out, Pieper, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & Van IJzendoorn, 2010) and, in extreme cases, crying can trigger abuse or neglect (Barr, Trent, & Cross, 2006; Compier-de Block et al., 2014, Soltis, 2004). To our knowledge, no study specifically focused on the role of infant facial emotional expressions in shaping behavioral approach/avoidance responses, but evidence from neurophysiological studies can help in formulating hypotheses. Brain activation during the perception of different expressions on baby faces has been studied both in parents and in individuals without children. Strathearn and colleagues (Strathearn, Li, Fonagy, & Montague, 2008) found that only own-babies’ emotional expressions, in particular happy expressions, were associated with the activation of dopaminergic neural reward circuits. This means that own infant’s smiling is considered a reinforcement for mothers. In nulliparous females Montoya and colleagues (Montoya et al., 2012) found that happy infant faces resulted in more activation in neural reward areas (the ventral striatum, caudate, ventromedial prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices) than sad infant faces. In contrast, a comparison of sad versus happy infant faces elicited more activation in neural empathy regions (the precuneus, cuneus and posterior cingulate cortex). This suggests that happy faces because of their more rewarding features may elicit a tendency to approach the infant. In contrast, sad faces may elicit a tendency to avoid the negative affect and to provide caregiving behavior to address the cause of negative feelings.
Adult facial expressions have been shown to elicit approach or avoidant responses, depending on the valence and salience of the emotional expression. The valence of an emotional expression seems to be automatically evaluated in order to provide a quick and adaptive response (Al-Shawaf, Conroy-Beam, Asao, & Buss, 2016; Bradley, Codispoti, Cuthbert, & Lang, 2001; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1998; Tooby & Cosmides, 2008). Emotional expressions elicit different behavioral responses that can be studied by means of a behavioral approach-avoidance task: participants are asked to approach or distance emotional faces presented on the screen through pulling or pushing a lever (Marsh, Ambady, & Kleck, 2005; Roelofs, Elzinga, & Rotteveel, 2005; Seidel, Habel, Kirschner, Gur, & Derntl, 2010). Results consistently show that happiness is associated with approach (Phaf, Mohr, Rotteveel, & Wicherts, 2014). Expressions of fear, sadness and anger elicit conflicting results (Paulus and Wentura, 2016, Phaf et al., 2014), probably because individual differences play a role in the perception of other people’s sadness. For instance, whereas other people’s sadness may elicit empathy and approach behavior aimed at helping the person in distress in some individuals, it may elicit avoidant responses in individuals who feel uncomfortable or even aversion when they are confronted with a sad person. Moreover, results can be explained by the social context of the perceived emotion, both in case of approach or avoidance. For example, a recent study showed that preference for approach or avoidance is influenced by contrast between emotions presented in the task. Paulus and Wentura (2016) showed that negative emotions (anger, fear, sadness) are avoided when paired with happiness, while anger and sadness elicit approach when paired with fear (that elicits avoidance). Thus, contextual and individual difference factors shape approach and avoidant responses to emotional expressions and this may reflect differences in social interaction in real life. Previous research indicates that there is an association between approach avoidance tendencies regarding social stimuli and actual behavior in interaction with these social stimuli, although the mechanism underlying this association is not completely clear (Van Dessel, Gawronski, Smith, & De Houwer, 2017). For instance, highly socially anxious individuals report more avoidance tendencies toward smiling and angry, but not neutral faces, compared to controls (Heuer, Rinck, & Becker, 2007; Staugaard, 2010) and post traumatic symptomatology is associated to a greater bias to avoid happy faces (Clausen et al., 2016).
One factor that may influence responses to emotional expressions is childhood caregiving experiences. For example, previous studies have shown that experiences of childhood abuse affect neural responses to sadness (Dannlowski et al., 2013). Adults with histories of maltreatment also have deficits in recognizing emotions (Ardizzi et al., 2015) and childhood abuse has been found to be associated with bias to threat in children (Pine et al., 2005) and in adults (Fani, Bradley-Davino, Ressler, & McClure-Tone, 2011). In addition, it has been shown that parents with a history of abuse respond differently to infant emotions. Parents with a history of parental emotional rejection were less accurate in identifying infant fear and anger and reported more negative attributions when asked to guess the causes of infant behaviors (Leerkes & Siepak, 2006). Since experiences of abuse during own childhood enhance the risk of using harsh caregiving responses (Pears & Capaldi, 2001), it is important to examine influences of childhood experiences on responding to infant emotions.
Another factor that may influence the processing of infant emotional expressions is mood. Mothers with a postpartum depression are more likely to identify negative emotions in infant faces while they are more inaccurate at detecting positive emotions (Webb & Ayers, 2015). Mothers with a history of depression may also manifest withdrawal behaviors in response to their infants’ distress. This seems one of the mechanisms implicated in disrupted interaction between depressed mothers and their children (Arteche et al., 2011), especially in terms of interactive emotion regulation (Reck et al., 2004). In a developmental perspective, maternal altered affect recognition could be central to the development of adverse emotional and behavioral outcomes in infants (Kluczniok et al., 2016). Furthermore, research indicates that mild depressive symptoms also affect responding to expressions of infant distress in individuals without children (Riem, Pieper, Out, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & van IJzendoorn, 2011).
Although mood and childhood experiences are known to influence parenting behavior, it is yet unclear whether these factors also influence responding to infant emotional expressions before the transition into parenthood. According to the concept of intergenerational transmission (Belsky, Conger, & Capaldi, 2009) also non-parents carry the imprint of parenting style experienced in childhood. It is therefore likely that influences of early parenting experiences on responses to infant emotions become apparent even before becoming a parent. The current study, therefore, examined the influence of childhood experiences and mood on responding to infant emotional expressions with an approach-avoidance task in individuals without children. We hypothesized that participants would be quicker in approaching infants with positive expressions and avoiding infants with negative expressions, as similar effects were found for adult faces. Moreover, we expected that responses to infants with positive and negative emotional expressions are influenced by childhood experiences and mood induction. In Study 1, we hypothesized that childhood negative caregiving experiences are associated with reduced approach of infant positive expressions and with augmented avoidance of negative expressions. In Study 2, we examined whether induced sad mood after an experimental mood manipulation would stimulate an augmented tendency to avoid sad infant faces and would diminish the tendency to approach happy faces. In contrast, we expected that a positive mood manipulation would have opposite effects, reducing the tendency to avoid sad faces and increasing the tendency to approach happy faces.
The paradigm was adapted from Rinck and colleagues (Heuer et al., 2007, Rinck and Becker, 2007) and is based on the Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT) (Chen and Bargh, 1999, Solarz, 1960), which has been used with emotional faces by Marsh and colleagues (Marsh et al., 2005). Approach was represented by pulling a joystick toward oneself and avoidance by pushing it away. Rinck and Becker (2007) found that this simple association can be biased because participants can assume that they move their hand toward the stimulus when they want to grab it. Thus, they proposed a zoom feature of the task, which means that when the joystick is pulled the face stimulus becomes bigger, simulating it is coming closer to the participant, and becomes smaller when the lever is pushed, simulating that it is moving away. Our paradigm uses four different types of infant expressions: smiling, sad, neutral and sleepy. The sleepy infant was added because it represents a non-positive expression but does not require the intervention of adults, meaning that there is no infant signal of need, contrary to the sad baby. We aimed at designing an implicit task, thus we presented to the participants two different conditions in randomized order: pulling or pushing depending on whether the infant face had a red mark on the forehead or not. Participants were asked to modulate their answers depending on the presence of the red dot, and they did not receive any information or instruction regarding infant expressions. We considered the reaction times of completing the movement of the joystick as an implicit measure of the congruency (or not) of the task for the participants: we expected reaction time (RT) to be quicker when a participant was asked to approach (vs avoid) a happy face or to avoid (vs approach) a sad face. No effect was expected for neutral and sleepy faces. Lastly we hypothesized that since individuals with negative childhood show an attention bias away from faces with negative emotional expressions (Pine, 2003), indicating that maltreatment is related to attention avoidance of negative emotions. Negative caregiving experiences may therefore also lead to an augmented bias in processing sad infants. Therefore we hypothesize shorter reaction times for avoiding (vs. approaching) sad infants in participants with higher scores for childhood negative caregiving experiences.
Section snippets
Participants
In a preliminary stage, 220 students (173 females) from Bicocca University of Milan completed the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire Short Form (CTQ-SF, Bernstein et al., 1994, Bernstein et al., 2003). during lecture time. Sixty-three nulliparous females (Age: M = 20.8, SD = 1.3) with scores ranging from low to high on a questionnaire measuring the negativity of caregiving childhood experiences were randomly selected for participation in exchange for credits. The study was carried out in accordance
Results and discussion
A linear mixed model was used to test for differences in reaction time when the participant was asked to approach versus to avoid the infant faces depending on the task request. The model tested the within-subjects fixed effects of the type of infant expression and the condition (i.e. the request to approach or avoid through the joystick). The random term consisted of the intercept and the condition effects, because not enough within-subject (cluster) variability was estimated for each emotion.
Participants
Forty-seven nulliparous females (Age: M = 21.4, SD = 1.7) with scores ranging from low to high on the CTQ-SF abuse scale were randomly selected for participation in exchange for course credits. The sample was recruited from the same population of in Study 1, but none of Study 2 participants had participated in Study 1. The study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the Declaration of Helsinki and was approved by the Ethical Committee of University of Milano − Bicocca. All
Results and discussion
We first tested the effectiveness of the mood manipulations using the PANAS evaluations. We performed two 2 × 2 repeated measures ANOVAs, one for the positive subscale and one for the negative subscale of the PANAS. In both cases, predictors were time (pre vs post manipulation) and type of manipulation (positive vs negative). For the negative subscale, results showed a significant interaction time x manipulation (F(1146) = 8.76, p < 0.01). As expected, there was no difference between the ratings
General discussion
In this study we examined approach and avoidance behavior in response to different infant emotional expressions in nulliparous women. The aim of the study was to test how infant emotional expressions affect adults’ behavioral responses in terms of predisposition to action. In Study 1, we found that individuals were faster in avoiding vs approaching sad, neutral and sleepy infant faces, indicating a bias to avoid sad, neutral and sleepy infant faces. Notably, the bias to avoid sad faces was
Conflicts of interest
The authors report no conflicts of interest.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Marinus H. van IJzendoorn and Marian J. Bakermans-Kranenburg for their helpful comments of this paper.
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