Infant face interest is associated with voice information and maternal psychological health

When novelty prevails on familiarity: Visual biases for child versus infant faces in 3.5- to 12-month-olds

The current study examined the influence of everyday perceptual experience with infant and child faces on the shaping of visual biases for faces in 3.5-, 6-, 9-, and 12-month-old infants. In Experiment 1, infants were presented with pairs of photographs of unfamiliar child and infant faces. Four groups with differential experience with infant and child faces were composed from parents' reports of daily exposure with infants and children (no experience, infant face experience, child face experience, and both infant and child face experience) to assess influence of experience on face preferences. Results showed that infants from all age groups displayed a bias for the novel category of faces in relation to their previous exposure to infant and child faces. In Experiment 2, this pattern of visual attention was reversed in infants presented with pictures of personally familiar child faces (i.e., older siblings) compared with unfamiliar infant faces, especially in older infants. These results suggest that allocation of attention for novelty can supersede familiarity biases for faces depending on experience and highlight that multiple factors drive infant visual behavior in responding to the social world.

Early development of attention to threat-related facial expressions

Infants from an early age have a bias to attend more to faces than non-faces and after 5 months are particularly attentive to fearful faces. We examined the specificity of this "fear bias" in 5-, 7-, and 12-month-old infants (N = 269) and 36-month-old children (N = 191) and whether its development is associated with features of the early rearing environment, specifically maternal anxiety and depression symptoms. Attention dwell times were assessed by measuring the latencies of gaze shifts from a stimulus at fixation to a new stimulus in the visual periphery. In infancy, dwell times were shorter for non-face control stimuli vs. happy faces at all ages, and happy vs. fearful, but not angry, faces at 7 and 12 months. At 36 months, dwell times were shorter for non-faces and happy faces compared to fearful and angry faces. Individual variations in attention dwell times were not associated with mothers' self-reported depression or anxiety symptoms at either age. The results suggest that sensitivity to fearful faces precedes a more general bias for threat-alerting stimuli in early development. We did not find evidence that the initial manifestation of these biases is related to moderate variations in maternal depression or anxiety symptoms.

How do parents' depression and anxiety, and infants' negative temperament relate to parent-infant face-to-face interactions?

The present study investigated the associations of mothers' and fathers' lifetime depression and anxiety symptoms, and of infants' negative temperament with parents' and infants' gaze, facial expressions of emotion, and synchrony. We observed infants' (age between 3.5 and 5.5 months, N = 101) and parents' gaze and facial expressions during 4-min naturalistic face-to-face interactions. Parents' lifetime symptoms of depression and anxiety were assessed with clinical interviews, and infants' negative temperament was measured with standardized observations. Parents with more depressive symptoms and their infants expressed less positive and more neutral affect. Parents' lifetime anxiety symptoms were not significantly related to parents' expressions of affect, while they were linked to longer durations of gaze to parent, and to more positive and negative affect in infants. Parents' lifetime depression or anxiety was not related to synchrony. Infants' temperament did not predict infants' or parents' interactive behavior. The study reveals that more depression symptoms in parents are linked to more neutral affect from parents and from infants during face-to-face interactions, while parents' anxiety symptoms are related to more attention to parent and less neutral affect from infants (but not from parents).