{"id":31478,"date":"2022-10-08T03:30:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-08T03:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=31478"},"modified":"2022-10-09T16:26:44","modified_gmt":"2022-10-09T16:26:44","slug":"mothers-who-recognize-others-happiness-are-more-responsive-to-their-infants-in-first-months-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/mothers-who-recognize-others-happiness-are-more-responsive-to-their-infants-in-first-months-of-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Mothers who recognize others\u2019 happiness are more responsive to their infants in first months of\u00a0life"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Jessica A. Stern<\/a>, University of Virginia<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eyes wide, a baby reaches for a toy. Her caregiver, sensing her interest, brings the toy within her grasp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGa!\u201d the baby exclaims, and her caregiver responds, \u201cYes!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the baby fusses, her caregiver rubs her back until she calms. The baby smiles, and her caregiver smiles back, in a moment of what psychologist Mary Ainsworth called \u201cmutual delight<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the dance of an infant and responsive caregiver. These \u201cserve-and-return<\/a>\u201d interactions are critical for babies\u2019 development. But for caregivers, becoming a responsive dance partner can be challenging, and researchers are eager to uncover the skills that help these interactions flourish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the University of Virginia BabyLab<\/a>, my colleagues and I explore<\/a> the early experiences and brain processes that lay the groundwork for infants\u2019 emerging social capacities \u2013 including experiences with caregivers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a new study, published in the journal Emotion<\/a>, we followed 120 mothers and babies over the first five months post-birth. We found that being emotionally perceptive, or able to identify others\u2019 emotional states from their facial expressions, is a key predictor of sensitive caregiving \u2013 the serve-and-return behaviors that make a responsive dance partner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the first weeks after birth, we showed mothers a series of adult strangers\u2019 faces that changed from a neutral expression to one of six emotions: happiness, fear, sadness, anger, disgust or another neutral face. Their job was to identify which emotion they were seeing and to do it as quickly as possible. This is no easy task, and when we calculated how accurate mothers were, we saw a wide range of performance, indicating that some had a harder time recognizing certain emotions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few months later, we invited the same mothers and their 5-month-olds into a playroom and asked them simply to \u201cplay with your child as you normally would\u201d for five minutes. From videos of their interactions, we were able to observe how each caregiver responded to her infant\u2019s signals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For many, the interaction was smooth, like a good conversation. Even when these babies cried or acted \u201cdifficult,\u201d their mothers\u2019 attuned responses quickly helped the babies settle and return to the important business of play. For others, the interaction was a struggle. Some mothers tried to control or interrupt their babies\u2019 play until the baby became still and withdrawn, while others ignored their babies\u2019 bids for comfort and connection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Mom
Responsive interactions with caregivers are crucial for babies\u2019 development. Artem Varnitsin\/EyeEm via Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When we looked at mothers\u2019 performance on the emotion perception task together with their behavior toward their infants, we found that a mother\u2019s ability to recognize happiness specifically \u2013 but not other emotions like fear or sadness \u2013 predicted how sensitive and responsive she was when interacting with her baby four months later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It wasn\u2019t that sensitive mothers expressed more happiness toward their babies \u2013 they weren\u2019t any more \u201csmiley\u201d than average. Rather, they were uniquely good at perceiving others\u2019 positive emotion. It\u2019s possible that the ability to recognize happiness in others generally allows mothers to better sense their babies\u2019 happiness specifically and respond accordingly. Thus, emotion perception skills may be an important hidden strength supporting sensitive care in the first months of a baby\u2019s life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s especially fascinating is that sensitive mothers were more perceptive of positive emotion measured using images of adult strangers. We can only speculate that mothers\u2019 perceptual abilities might translate to recognizing their own infants\u2019 emotions, which may help them respond sensitively to their babies\u2019 emotional signals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More questions to explore<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Our study included only mothers living in the United States. We observed them during only one short play session with their infants. It remains to be seen whether our results will be similar or different for fathers, in other cultures or in more stressful contexts. For instance, it\u2019s possible that recognizing negative emotions \u2013 like fear or sadness \u2013 matters more for caregivers\u2019 responses when their babies are upset or stressed. We hope to study these possibilities in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sensitive and responsive interactions with caregivers are critical for building babies\u2019 brains<\/a> and forecasting later social skills<\/a> and even physical health<\/a>. The findings provide support for programs that build caregivers\u2019 emotional skills, including the ability to recognize others\u2019 joy. Understanding the emotional intelligence skills that support sensitive caregiving can help inform early interventions to foster healthy, secure parent-child relationships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jessica A. Stern<\/a>, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Psychology, University of Virginia<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jessica A. Stern, University of Virginia Eyes wide, a baby reaches for a toy. Her caregiver, sensing her interest, brings the toy within her grasp. \u201cGa!\u201d the baby exclaims, and her caregiver responds, \u201cYes!\u201d When the baby fusses, her caregiver rubs her back until she calms. The baby smiles, and her caregiver smiles back, in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":31479,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3410],"tags":[1858,10072,730,3563,1034],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31478"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31478"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31484,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31478\/revisions\/31484"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}