Developmental patterns of affective attention across the first 2 years of life

Abstract

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Assessing bidirectional relations between infant temperamental negative affect, maternal anxiety symptoms and infant affect-biased attention across the first 24-months of life.

“…Previous work suggests that maternal anxiety is related to infant attention to emotion more generally (Kataja et al, 2019; Vallorani et al, 2021). Furthermore, evidence suggests that elevated attention to indirect threats, such as fearful facial configurations, during the first year of life may taper off within the second year of life (Peltola et al, 2018), but that attention to direct threats, such as angry facial configurations may emerge (Leppänen et al, 2018; Reider et al, 2022; Xie et al, 2021). During the second year of life, infants may broaden their processing of socioemotional stimuli and incorporate environmental input across more diverse aspects of the social world, including biases to positive stimuli.…”

“…Although recent evidence suggests attention to direct threats are later emerging (Reider et al, 2022; Xie et al, 2021) and may not be specific to maternal symptoms of depression or anxiety (Leppänen et al, 2018), those data have been assessed cross-sectionally or without consideration for individual differences. To thoroughly test theories of affect-biased attention development (Field & Lester, 2010; Morales et al, 2016), it was important to employ a longitudinal design from the earliest ages that repeatedly assessed both mothers and infants.…”

“…Recent work suggests this peak in affect-biased attention to indirect signals of threat, like fearful facial configurations, may dissipate by the time infants turn 2 (Peltola et al, 2018). In contrast, biased attention to direct signals of threat, such as angry facial configurations, may only just emerge between 18 and 24 months (Leppänen et al, 2018; Reider et al, 2022; Xie et al, 2021). Affect-biased attention to direct threats, as measured by attention to angry facial configurations, is related to anxiety in children and adults (Bar-Haim et al, 2007).…”

Less attention to emotional faces is associated with low empathy and prosociality in 12‐to 20‐month old infants

“…Previous findings support that 134 ms is a sufficient length of time to capture both fixation as well as infants' individual differences in processing of faces. First, a fixation is typically defined as 100 ms, and previous papers have published this fixation length in infancy (see Reider et al., 2022), demonstrating that infants are able to fixate on a face in that length of time and display different attentional patterns. Second, ERP studies have demonstrated differential processing of faces as soon as 100 ms after face stimulus presentation.…”

A two-hit model of behavioral inhibition and anxiety

“…This fear bias may precede or coincide with emerging fear behaviors (LoBue et al, 2019), possibly guiding perception and reaction to emergent challenges. Over time, infants become faster at detecting and less likely to disengage from angry faces (Pérez-Edgar et al, 2017;Xie et al, 2021), culminating in a distinguishable anger bias by age 2 (Reider et al, 2022). This lateremerging anger bias may build upon an infant's budding ability to connect others' negative emotions to their subsequent behavior, beginning between 10 and 14 months of age (Ruba et al, 2020).…”