Parental Sensory Processing Sensitivity Predicts Children’s Visual Scanning Pattern of Emotional Faces

A child’s exposure to environmental contingencies in combination with neurocognitive and temperamental susceptibility factors, may lead to a differential impact on a child’s emotional functioning, especially concerning Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS). The current eye-tracking study sought to investigate the effects of both children’s and parents’ SPS in predicting the visual scanning patterns of children toward emotional faces. For this study, children performed a facial processing computerized task in the lab. The sample consisted of 153 children (M = 9.97; SD: 1.28). The study provides evidence for the effects of parental SPS on the eye gaze patterns of children when processing emotional faces, where children with high parental SPS were found to spend significantly less time looking into the eyes region of happy child faces, and less time looking into the mouth region of angry adult faces. The study underlines the potential existence of a pattern of intergenerational continuity of affectivity in the family context that involves early neurocognitive mechanisms of emotion-related attention allocation to both positive and negative emotional information. The potential for individual differences in environmental sensitivity that may interact with individual-level characteristics, such as behavioral problems early in life is discussed.