Moderating effects of environmental stressors on the development of attention to threat in infancy

Abstract

An attention bias to threat has been linked to psychosocial outcomes across development, including anxiety (Pérez-Edgar, K., Bar-Haim, Y., McDermott, J. M., Chronis-Tuscano, A., Pine, D. S., & Fox, N. A. (2010). Attention biases to threat and behavioral inhibition in early childhood shape adolescent social withdrawal. Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 10(3), 349). Although some attention biases to threat are normative, it remains unclear how these biases diverge into maladaptive patterns of emotion processing for some infants. Here, we examined the relation between household stress, maternal anxiety, and attention bias to threat in a longitudinal sample of infants tested at 4, 8, and 12 months. Infants were presented with a passive viewing eye-tracking task in which angry, happy, or neutral facial configurations appeared in one of the four corners of a screen. We measured infants' latency to fixate each target image and collected measures of parental anxiety and daily hassles at each timepoint. Intensity of daily parenting hassles moderated patterns of attention bias to threat in infants over time. Infants exposed to heightened levels of parental hassles became slower to detect angry (but not happy) facial configurations compared with neutral faces between 4 and 12 months of age, regardless of parental anxiety. Our findings highlight the potential impact of the environment on the development of infants' early threat processing and the need to further investigate how early environmental factors shape the development of infant emotion processing.

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

“…How to cite this article: Reider, L. B., Bierstedt, L., Burris, J. L., Vallorani, A., Gunther, K. E., Buss, K. A., Pérez-Edgar, K., Field, A. P., & LoBue, V. (2022). Developmental patterns of affective attention across the first 2 years of life.…”

“…Here we sought to establish a data-driven approach to retain as much data as possible, but eliminate participants whose data were not reliable. We did this by determining the minimum number of trials required to achieve a stable mean latency using two metrics used in a previously reported analysis (described in Burris et al, 2022), that were adapted from Goldsworthy et al (2016) and Cuypers et al (2014). This method is based on calculating a rolling mean-or the average latency including all trials up to the current trial-and comparing it to the overall mean latency across all trials.…”

How the Emotional Environment Shapes the Emotional Life of the Child

“…First and foremost, emotional input begins to shape the infants' emotional understanding from the first few months of life. Indeed, differences in trajectories of infants' emotion perception based on environmental factors start as early as 4 months of age (Burris et al, 2021). The neural circuitry that supports the processing of faces and emotional information develops during the first year of life (Bowman et al, 2021).…”

“…At 4 months, the infants whose parents reported a high number of parenting hassles were faster to detect angry or threatening facial configurations compared to the other infants. However, while infants of parents who reported a low or average number of hassles got faster to detect threat over time relative to the other emotions, infants of parents who reported high levels of hassles slowed in their detection of angry (but not happy) facial configurations compared to neutral faces between 4 and 12 months (Burris et al, 2021). This suggests that high levels of normative parenting stress relate to differences in the way infants perceive emotional information, and that these differences are detectable by 4 months of age .…”

Maternal stress and development of infant attention to threat‐related facial expressions

“…Emerging evidence suggests that maternal anxiety may interact with infant temperament, such that greater infant attentional biases toward threat‐related facial expressions is only present in infants with both high negative affect and mothers with high anxiety symptoms (Vallorani et al., 2021). Evidence of an association between parent stress and infant attentional bias to threat‐related facial expressions is limited; recent research suggests that parent stress is associated with slower infant detection of angry facial expressions (Burris et al., 2022). The experience of poverty has been shown to influence stress‐mediating systems (Evans & Kim, 2007), which also could result in heightened attention to threat‐related expressions.…”