Development of communicative behaviors in preterm infants: The effects of birthweight status and gestational age

All smiles are positive, but some smiles are more positive than others.

“…The basis for interpreting different types of smiles as indexes of positive emotion rests in the meaning of the situations in which the smiles occur. The initial inference that gazing at mother and mother smiling elicit positive infant emotion, however, was based on previous research in which infants tended to smile and produce neutral or positive vocalizations during these interactive periods (Kaye & Fogel, 1980;van Beek et al, 1994;Weinberg & Tronick, 1994). Both in previous research and in the current research, however, nonemotional factors might lead infants to smile and vocalize during these interactive periods.…”

“…During face-to-face interactions, infants in the first half year of life engage in more generic smiling when gazing directly at their mothers' faces than when gazing away from their mothers' faces (van Beek, Hopkins, & Joeksma, 1994;Weinberg & Tronick, 1994). Independently of gaze direction, infants also engage in more generic smiling when their mothers are smiling than when they are not smiling (Kaye & Fogel, 1980), which suggests that infants perceive maternal smiles even when they are not gazing directly at their mothers' faces.…”

“…Independently of gaze direction, infants also engage in more generic smiling when their mothers are smiling than when they are not smiling (Kaye & Fogel, 1980), which suggests that infants perceive maternal smiles even when they are not gazing directly at their mothers' faces. Infants also tend to produce neutral or positive vocalizations when their mothers are smiling and when gazing at their mothers' faces (Kaye & Fogel, 1980;van Beek et al, 1994;Weinberg & Tronick, 1994). These findings suggest that gazing at mother and mother smiling tend to elicit positive emotion or similar states that make infant generic smiling and vocalizations more likely.…”

Gaze aversion during social interaction in preterm infants: A function of attention skills?

“…In addition to orienting towards the person's face, infants will show increasing interest in the environment by orienting and visually exploring objects surrounding them. It has frequently been observed that, from at least three months onwards, the duration of time a child spends gazing towards a person's face during face-to-face interaction decreases in favor of an increase in time spent orienting on objects in the environment (Feldman, 2007a;Kaye & Fogel, 1980;van Beek, Hopkins, & Hoeksma, 1994). It is hypothesized that this latter development is a function of increased maturation of the visual attention network (Johnson, Posner, & Rothbart, 1991), but it can be assumed that it will also be a function of the ability of the interaction partner to maintain the interest of the child towards him or her and a Gaze aversion in preterm infants 4 function of the tendency of the interaction partner to stimulate the infant's exploration of the environment.…”

“…It is important to emphasize that periods of gazing away did not include periods of time in which children were orienting towards objects in the environment, similar to van Beek, Hopkins, and Hoeksma (1994), in addition to the exclusion of the periods of time infants were gazing at their mother. Other studies have operationalized periods of gazing away as those periods during which infants were not engaged in eye contact with the mother (Field, 1977;Malatesta, Grigoryev, Lamb, Abin, & Culver, 1986).…”