Infant‐holding biases in mothers and affective symptoms during pregnancy and after delivery

Vauclair, Jacques; Scola, Céline

doi:10.1002/icd.594

Cited by 25 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…For reasons not yet clear, depression (Vauclair & Scola, 2009;Weatherill et al, 2004) and/or stress (Reissland, Hopkins, Helms, & Williams, 2009;Suter, Huggenberger, & Schächinger, 2007) reduce leftholding preference. These latter findings leave open the possibility that the reduction in face visibility of the right-holding mothers in the present study was caused by chance differences between the left-holding and right-holding groups in symptoms of depression or levels of stress.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Holding-side influences on infant's view of mother's face

Hendriks

Rijswijk

Omtzigt

2011

Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition

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Recently we found that adult children whose mothers had had a right-arm preference for holding infants have a reduced left bias for recognising faces, suggesting that they are less well right-hemisphere lateralised for perceiving faces. One possible explanation of this finding is that early visual exposure to faces is suboptimal for right-held infants. To test this idea, we asked mothers to pick up a doll with an inbuilt camera in its face and to start bottle-feeding it. The results showed that less was visible of the face of mothers who held the doll on their right arm in comparison to those who held the doll on their left arm: From the right arm, the mother's left half of the face was less visible when the mothers were looking up and their right half of the face was less visible when they were looking at the doll. These results suggest that right-held infants receive suboptimal information from faces. Because early face exposure is important for face-processing development, the suboptimal face exposure probably experienced by right-held infants may have consequences for their ability to recognise faces and facial emotion later in life.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Holding-side influences on infant's view of mother's face

Hendriks

Rijswijk

Omtzigt

2011

Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition

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“…The tendency to hold infants on the left has been attributed to many factors including emotional communication between infant and mother [99]. A recent study [100] reported three results: (a) mothers displayed a significant leftward (71%) holding bias, (b) mothers with affective symptoms held their babies more on the right and more frequently in the vertical position, and (c) hemispheric specialization for perceiving visual emotions had no significant effect on the holding-side biases of new mothers. The above results fit our proposed framework: holding a baby on the left exposes the mother's face in the upper right visual field, the quadrant entrusted by evolution to be critical for emotion separation, likely through preserving ipsilateral connection to the right amygdale.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion Separation Is Completed Early and It Depends on Visual Field Presentation

Liu

Ioannides

2010

PLoS ONE

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It is now apparent that the visual system reacts to stimuli very fast, with many brain areas activated within 100 ms. It is, however, unclear how much detail is extracted about stimulus properties in the early stages of visual processing. Here, using magnetoencephalography we show that the visual system separates different facial expressions of emotion well within 100 ms after image onset, and that this separation is processed differently depending on where in the visual field the stimulus is presented. Seven right-handed males participated in a face affect recognition experiment in which they viewed happy, fearful and neutral faces. Blocks of images were shown either at the center or in one of the four quadrants of the visual field. For centrally presented faces, the emotions were separated fast, first in the right superior temporal sulcus (STS; 35–48 ms), followed by the right amygdala (57–64 ms) and medial pre-frontal cortex (83–96 ms). For faces presented in the periphery, the emotions were separated first in the ipsilateral amygdala and contralateral STS. We conclude that amygdala and STS likely play a different role in early visual processing, recruiting distinct neural networks for action: the amygdala alerts sub-cortical centers for appropriate autonomic system response for fight or flight decisions, while the STS facilitates more cognitive appraisal of situations and links appropriate cortical sites together. It is then likely that different problems may arise when either network fails to initiate or function properly.

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“…One possible interpretation of this finding comes from adult cradling studies, which have reported an association between affective symptoms and the strength of the LCB. For example, mothers who held their infants on the right side reported higher stress levels than those holding on the left (Reissland et al, 2009;Vauclair & Scola, 2009). The immediate effect of stress is also associated with right-holding; women who undertook a bilateral cold pressor task, which significantly increased their blood pressure and heart rate, were more likely to hold a doll on the right than controls (Suter, Huggenberger, & Schächinger, 2007).…”

Section: Cradling Biases and Socio-communicative Scoresmentioning

confidence: 99%

The left cradling bias: An evolutionary facilitator of social cognition?

Forrester

Davis

Mareschal

et al. 2019

Cortex

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A robust left side cradling bias (LCB) in humans is argued to reflect an evolutionarily old left visual field bias and right hemisphere dominance for processing social stimuli. A left visual field bias for face processing, invoked via the LCB, is known to reflect a human population-level right cerebral hemisphere specialization for processing social stimuli. We explored the relationship between cradling side biases, hand dominance and socio-communicative abilities. Four and five year old typically-developing children (N = 98) participated in a battery of manual motor tasks interspersed by cradling trials comprising a(n): infant human doll, infant primate doll, proto-face pillow and no-face pillow. Mean social and communication ability scores were obtained via a survey completed by each child's key teacher. We found a population-level LCB for holding an infant human doll that was not influenced by hand dominance, sex, age or experience of having a younger sibling. Children demonstrating a LCB, did however, obtain a significantly higher mean social ability score compared with their right side cradling counterparts. Like the infant human doll, the proto-face pillow's schematic face symbol was sufficient to elicit a population-level LCB. By contrast, the infant primate doll elicited a population-level right side cradling bias, influenced by both hand dominance and sex. The findings suggest that the LCB is present and visible early in development and is likely therefore, to represent evolutionarily old domain-specific organization and function of the right cerebral hemisphere. Additionally, results suggest that a LCB requires minimal triggering but can be reversed in some situations, possibly in response to species-type or levels of novelty or stress as perceived by the viewer. Patterns of behavioral biases within the context of social stimuli and their associations with cognitive ability are important for understanding how socio-communication abilities emerge in developing children.

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Infant‐holding biases in mothers and affective symptoms during pregnancy and after delivery

Cited by 25 publications

References 37 publications

Holding-side influences on infant's view of mother's face

Holding-side influences on infant's view of mother's face

Emotion Separation Is Completed Early and It Depends on Visual Field Presentation

The left cradling bias: An evolutionary facilitator of social cognition?

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