Difficulty in disengaging from threat and temperamental negative affectivity in early life: A longitudinal study of infants aged 12–36 months

Abstract

BackgroundAttention disengagement is reportedly influenced by perceiving a fearful facial expression even in the first year of life. In the present study, we examined whether individual differences in disengaging from fearful expressions predict temperamental negative affectivity.MethodTwenty-six infants were studied longitudinally at 12, 18, 24, and 36 months, using an overlap paradigm and two temperament questionnaires: the Japanese versions of the revised Infant Behavior Questionnaire and Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire.ResultsThe infants fixated significantly more frequently to fearful than to happy or neutral faces. The attentional bias to threat (i.e., the number of fixed responses on fearful faces divided by the total number of fixed responses on faces) at 12 months was significantly positively correlated with negative affect at 12 months, and its relations with negative affect measured later in development was in the expected positive direction at each age. In addition, a moderation analysis indicates that the orienting network and not the executive network marginally moderated the relation between early attentional bias and later fear.ConclusionsThe results suggest that at 12 months, infants with more negative affectivity exhibit greater difficulty in disengaging their attention from fearful faces. We also found evidence that the association between parent-reported fear and disengagement might be modulated in the second year, perhaps because of the differences in temperamental control networks.

Maternal anxiety predicts attentional bias towards threat in infancy.

“…However, few studies have evaluated the relation between attention bias and temperament during the developmental period when these constructs first emerge. One exception is a recent study in which at 12 months of age, infants higher in negative affect displayed greater attention bias to threat—as measured by difficulty disengaging from fearful faces (Nakagawa & Sukigara, 2012). These data suggest that attention bias to threat may be associated with fearful temperament from early infancy.…”

Attachment and maternal sensitivity are related to infants’ monitoring of animated social interactions

“…A growing body of evidence suggests a relation between attention biases and infant temperament (Kiel and Buss ; Pérez‐Edgar et al. ; Nakagawa and Sukigara ). For example, Nakagawa and Sukigara () found that 12 months old infants whose parents reported more negative affectivity showed greater difficulty in disengaging their attention from negative social stimuli.…”

Infants' attention bias to faces as an early marker of social development

“…Farley, Hietanen, & Nelson, 2009), but there are indications that this tendency may decline and shift toward a more adult-like (e.g.,Green, Williams, & Davidson, 2003) distributed scanning pattern over time.Further research is needed to examine whether some of these processes contribute to infants' attention holding on faces (and, particularly, fearful faces) and the potential subsequent reduction of these biases in early childhood. WhileNakagawa and Sukigara (2012) observed in a small longitudinal sample that attention to neutral, happy, and fearful faces declined from 24 to 36 months of age, cross-sectional studies investigating attention to neutral, happy, and angry faces in 4-to 24-month-old(Morales et al, 2017) and 9-to 48-month-old (Burris, Barry-Anwar, & Rivera, 2017) children pointed to a more stable pattern by showing that the patterns of attention biases toward angry and happy faces were not affected by age. WhileNakagawa and Sukigara (2012) observed in a small longitudinal sample that attention to neutral, happy, and fearful faces declined from 24 to 36 months of age, cross-sectional studies investigating attention to neutral, happy, and angry faces in 4-to 24-month-old(Morales et al, 2017) and 9-to 48-month-old (Burris, Barry-Anwar, & Rivera, 2017) children pointed to a more stable pattern by showing that the patterns of attention biases toward angry and happy faces were not affected by age.…”