Variable- and person-centered approaches to affect-biased attention in infancy reveal unique relations with infant negative affect and maternal anxiety

Abstract

Affect-biased attention is an automatic process that prioritizes emotionally or motivationally salient stimuli. Several models of affect-biased attention and its development suggest that it comprises an individual’s ability to both engage with and disengage from emotional stimuli. Researchers typically rely on singular tasks to measure affect-biased attention, which may lead to inconsistent results across studies. Here we examined affect-biased attention across three tasks in a unique sample of 193 infants, using both variable-centered (factor analysis; FA) and person-centered (latent profile analysis; LPA) approaches. Using exploratory FA, we found evidence for two factors of affect-biased attention: an Engagement factor and a Disengagement factor, where greater maternal anxiety was related to less engagement with faces. Using LPA, we found two groups of infants with different patterns of affect-biased attention: a Vigilant group and an Avoidant group. A significant interaction noted that infants higher in negative affect who also had more anxious mothers were most likely to be in the Vigilant group. Overall, these results suggest that both FA and LPA are viable approaches for studying distinct questions related to the development of affect-biased attention, and set the stage for future longitudinal work examining the role of infant negative affect and maternal anxiety in the emergence of affect-biased attention.

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

“…Additionally, older infants high in both negative affect and attentional control are faster to orient to neutral than emotion face configurations in a vigilance task (Fu et al, 2020). In our previous work, negative affect was not associated to affect-biased attention when examining engagement with faces (Morales, Brown, et al, 2017;Vallorani et al, 2021), but did interact with maternal anxiety when examining patterns of attention (Vallorani et al, 2021). Negative affect may function as a relatively stable internal individual difference that colors how infants filter, process and react to socioemotional stimuli in their environment.…”

“…Attention to threat in early life, commonly measured using threatening face configurations, is a normative process (LoBue, 2009;LoBue & DeLoache, 2010;LoBue & Rakison, 2013), emerging around 7-months (Peltola et al, 2008(Peltola et al, , 2009 and tapering off within the second year of life (Peltola et al, 2018), though not all cross-sectional work has noted a clear peak in affect-biased attention (Burris et al, 2017;Vallorani et al, 2021). For some individuals, attention to threat may be, or may become, entrenched or inflexible, leading to affect-biased attention.…”

“…Indeed, multiple broader developmental theories highlight the importance of studying developmental processes as complex systems of internal and external drives that bi-directionally influence the course of development (Lerner et al, 2015;Overton, 2015). With respect to general affect-biased attention during early life (Fu et al, 2020;Vallorani et al, 2021), and especially attention bias to threat (Kataja et al, 2019;Morales, Brown, et al, 2017;Pérez-Edgar et al, 2017), both infant temperamental negative affect and maternal anxiety have been associated with how patterns of affect-biased attention unfold over time.…”

Psychometric properties of infant electroencephalography: Developmental stability, reliability, and construct validity of frontal alpha asymmetry and delta–beta coupling

“…However, it is not clear that our construct validity patterns would necessarily be the same were we to assess temperamental dif- Relatedly, in assessing the temperament measures, we have focused exclusively on patterns of zero-order correlations, presented measureby-measure and age-by-age. It may be that more comprehensive approaches that consolidate the data with variable-(e.g., factor analysis) or person-centered (e.g., latent profile analysis) techniques may find unique relations with our EEG measures, as these approaches can account for noisy measures and extract unique underlying patterns (Vallorani et al, 2021). In addition, as noted above, the EEG-derived measures may more reliably act as moderators or mediators of temperamentally linked developmental trajectories.…”

Study Protocol: Longitudinal Attention and Temperament Study

“…Our prior work has examined associated questions in cross-sectional samples ( 23 – 27 ). The Longitudinal Attention and Temperament study (LAnTs; Figure 2 ) was designed to extend this work by bringing together three developmentally-appropriate tasks (dot-probe, overlap, vigilance) that can be used across the first 2 years of life ( 26 ). In addition, we assess early temperament using both observed behavior and parental reports.…”