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Aija A, Leppänen J, Aarnos L, Hyvönen M, Ståhlberg-Forsén E, Ahlqvist-Björkroth S, Stolt S, Toome L, Lehtonen L. Exposure to the parents' speech is positively associated with preterm infant's face preference. Pediatr Res 2024:10.1038/s41390-024-03239-8. [PMID: 38783114 DOI: 10.1038/s41390-024-03239-8] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/01/2023] [Revised: 12/05/2023] [Accepted: 12/26/2023] [Indexed: 05/25/2024]
Abstract
BACKGROUND The parents' presence and involvement in neonatal care is a promising approach to improve preterm infants' neurodevelopmental outcomes. We examined whether exposure to the parents' speech is associated with the preterm infant's social-cognitive development. METHODS The study included infants born before 32 gestational weeks in two neonatal units. Each infant's language environment was assessed from 16-hour recordings using Language Environment Analysis (LENA®). Parental presence was assessed with Closeness Diary for 14 days during the hospital stay. Attention to faces and non-face patterns was measured at the corrected age of seven months using an eye-tracking disengagement test. RESULTS A total of 63 preterm infants were included. Infants were less likely to disengage their attention from faces (M = 0.55, SD = 0.26) than non-face patterns (M = 0.24, SD = 0.22), p < 0.001, d = 0.84. Exposure to the parents' speech during the neonatal period was positively correlated with the preference for faces over non-face patterns (rs = 0.34, p = 0.009) and with the preference for parents over unfamiliar faces (rs = 0.28, p = 0.034). CONCLUSION The exposure to the parents' speech during neonatal hospital care is a potential early marker for later social development in preterm infants. IMPACT The exposure to the parents' speech during neonatal intensive care is a potential early marker for optimal social-cognitive development in preterm infants. This is the first study to show an association between parental vocal contact during neonatal intensive care and early social development (i.e., face preference), measured at seven months of corrected age. Our findings suggest that we should pay attention to the parents' vocal contact with their child in the neonatal intensive care unit and identify need for tailored support for face-to-face and vocal contact.
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Affiliation(s)
- Anette Aija
- University of Turku, Turku, Finland.
- Department of Neonatal and Infant Medicine, Tallinn Children's Hospital, Tallinn, Estonia.
| | - Jukka Leppänen
- Department of Psychology and Speech-Language Pathology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland
| | | | | | - Eva Ståhlberg-Forsén
- Department of Psychology and Logopedics, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
| | | | - Suvi Stolt
- Department of Psychology and Logopedics, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
| | - Liis Toome
- Department of Neonatal and Infant Medicine, Tallinn Children's Hospital, Tallinn, Estonia
| | - Liisa Lehtonen
- University of Turku, Turku, Finland
- Department of Pediatrics, Turku University Hospital, Turku, Finland
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Gu S, Jiang Y, Liu M, Li Y, Liang Y, Feng R, Xu M, Wang F, Huang JH. Eye movements and ERP biomarkers for face processing problems in avoidant attachment-style individuals. Front Behav Neurosci 2023; 17:1135909. [PMID: 37273280 PMCID: PMC10235504 DOI: 10.3389/fnbeh.2023.1135909] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/21/2023] [Accepted: 05/03/2023] [Indexed: 06/06/2023] Open
Abstract
Background Avoidant attachment poses a serious risk to intimate relationships and offspring. However, there are few studies on the face-processing characteristics and impairments of avoidant individuals based on basic emotion theory. Therefore, this study investigated the issues of emotional processing and deactivation strategies in individuals with avoidant attachment. Methods Avoidant and secure individuals were recruited to participate in an eye-tracking experiment and a two-choice oddball task in which they had to distinguish facial expressions of basic emotions (sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and neutral). Eye fixation durations to various parts of the face, including the eyes, nose, and mouth, were measured, and three event-related potentials (ERP) components (P100, N170, and P300) were monitored. Results Avoidant individuals could not process facial expressions as easily as secure individuals. Avoidant individuals focused less on the eyes of angry faces when compared to secure individuals. They also exhibited a more positive P100 component and a less negative N170 component when processing faces and a larger amplitude of the P300 component than secure individuals when processing emotional expressions. Conclusion Avoidant individuals use deactivating strategies and exhibit specific characteristics at different stages, which are of great significance in social interaction.
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Affiliation(s)
- Simeng Gu
- Department of Psychology, School of Medicine, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, Jiangsu, China
| | - Yao Jiang
- Institute of Brain and Psychological Science, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, Sichuan, China
| | - Mei Liu
- Institute of Brain and Psychological Science, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, Sichuan, China
| | - Yumeng Li
- Department of Psychology, School of Medicine, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, Jiangsu, China
| | - Yuan Liang
- Institute of Brain and Psychological Science, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, Sichuan, China
| | - Rou Feng
- Institute of Brain and Psychological Science, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, Sichuan, China
| | - Minghong Xu
- Department of Neurology, Lianyungang Hospital of Chinese Medicine, Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Nanjing, China
| | - Fushun Wang
- Institute of Brain and Psychological Science, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, Sichuan, China
| | - Jason H. Huang
- Department of Neurosurgery, Baylor Scott & White Health Center, Temple, TX, United States
- Department of Surgery, Texas A&M University, Temple, TX, United States
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Tsou YT, Li B, Kret ME, Frijns JHM, Rieffe C. Hearing Status Affects Children's Emotion Understanding in Dynamic Social Situations: An Eye-Tracking Study. Ear Hear 2021; 42:1024-1033. [PMID: 33369943 PMCID: PMC8221710 DOI: 10.1097/aud.0000000000000994] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/25/2022]
Abstract
OBJECTIVES For children to understand the emotional behavior of others, the first two steps involve emotion encoding and emotion interpreting, according to the Social Information Processing model. Access to daily social interactions is prerequisite to a child acquiring these skills, and barriers to communication such as hearing loss impede this access. Therefore, it could be challenging for children with hearing loss to develop these two skills. The present study aimed to understand the effect of prelingual hearing loss on children's emotion understanding, by examining how they encode and interpret nonverbal emotional cues in dynamic social situations. DESIGN Sixty deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) children and 71 typically hearing (TH) children (3-10 years old, mean age 6.2 years, 54% girls) watched videos of prototypical social interactions between a target person and an interaction partner. At the end of each video, the target person did not face the camera, rendering their facial expressions out of view to participants. Afterward, participants were asked to interpret the emotion they thought the target person felt at the end of the video. As participants watched the videos, their encoding patterns were examined by an eye tracker, which measured the amount of time participants spent looking at the target person's head and body and at the interaction partner's head and body. These regions were preselected for analyses because they had been found to provide cues for interpreting people's emotions and intentions. RESULTS When encoding emotional cues, both the DHH and TH children spent more time looking at the head of the target person and at the head of the interaction partner than they spent looking at the body or actions of either person. Yet, compared with the TH children, the DHH children looked at the target person's head for a shorter time (b = -0.03, p = 0.030), and at the target person's body (b = 0.04, p = 0.006) and at the interaction partner's head (b = 0.03, p = 0.048) for a longer time. The DHH children were also less accurate when interpreting emotions than their TH peers (b = -0.13, p = 0.005), and their lower scores were associated with their distinctive encoding pattern. CONCLUSIONS The findings suggest that children with limited auditory access to the social environment tend to collect visually observable information to compensate for ambiguous emotional cues in social situations. These children may have developed this strategy to support their daily communication. Yet, to fully benefit from such a strategy, these children may need extra support for gaining better social-emotional knowledge.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yung-Ting Tsou
- Unit of Developmental and Educational Psychology, Institute of Psychology, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
| | - Boya Li
- Unit of Developmental and Educational Psychology, Institute of Psychology, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
| | - Mariska E. Kret
- Cognitive Psychology Unit, Institute of Psychology, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
- Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
| | - Johan H. M. Frijns
- Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
- Department of Otorhinolaryngology and Head & Neck Surgery, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands
| | - Carolien Rieffe
- Unit of Developmental and Educational Psychology, Institute of Psychology, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
- Department of Psychology and Human Development, Institute of Education, University College London, London, UK
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Pyykkö J, Ashorn U, Chilora E, Maleta K, Ashorn P, Leppänen JM. Associations between individual variations in visual attention at 9 months and behavioral competencies at 18 months in rural Malawi. PLoS One 2020; 15:e0239613. [PMID: 33002053 PMCID: PMC7529224 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0239613] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/25/2020] [Accepted: 09/10/2020] [Indexed: 11/18/2022] Open
Abstract
Theoretical and empirical considerations suggest that individual differences in infant visual attention correlate with variations in cognitive skills later in childhood. Here we tested this hypothesis in infants from rural Malawi (n = 198-377, depending on analysis), who were assessed with eye tracking tests of visual orienting, anticipatory looks, and attention to faces at 9 months, and more conventional tests of cognitive control (A-not-B), motor, language, and socioemotional development at 18 months. The results showed no associations between measures of infant attention at 9 months and cognitive skills at 18 months, either in analyses linking infant visual orienting with broad cognitive outcomes or analyses linking specific constructs between the two time points (i.e., switching of anticipatory looks and manual reaching responses), as correlations varied between -0.08 and 0.14. Measures of physical growth, and family socioeconomic characteristics were also not correlated with cognitive outcomes at 18 months in the current sample (correlations between -0.10 and 0.19). The results do not support the use of the current tests of infant visual attention as a predictive tool for 18-month-old infants' cognitive skills in the Malawian setting. The results are discussed in light of the potential limitations of the employed infant tests as well as potentially unique characteristics of early cognitive development in low-resource settings.
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Affiliation(s)
- Juha Pyykkö
- Center for Child Health Research, Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
| | - Ulla Ashorn
- Center for Child Health Research, Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
| | - Eletina Chilora
- Department of Public Health, School of Public Health and Family Medicine, College of Medicine, University of Malawi, Blantyre, Malawi
| | - Kenneth Maleta
- Department of Public Health, School of Public Health and Family Medicine, College of Medicine, University of Malawi, Blantyre, Malawi
| | - Per Ashorn
- Center for Child Health Research, Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
- Department of Paediatrics, Tampere University Hospital, Tampere, Finland
| | - Jukka M. Leppänen
- Infant Cognition Laboratory, Center for Child Health Research, Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
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Tuulari JJ, Kataja EL, Leppänen JM, Lewis JD, Nolvi S, Häikiö T, Lehtola SJ, Hashempour N, Saunavaara J, Scheinin NM, Korja R, Karlsson L, Karlsson H. Newborn left amygdala volume associates with attention disengagement from fearful faces at eight months. Dev Cogn Neurosci 2020; 45:100839. [PMID: 32836078 PMCID: PMC7451600 DOI: 10.1016/j.dcn.2020.100839] [Citation(s) in RCA: 11] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/03/2019] [Revised: 06/26/2020] [Accepted: 08/12/2020] [Indexed: 02/09/2023] Open
Abstract
After 5 months of age, infants begin to prioritize attention to fearful over other facial expressions. One key proposition is that amygdala and related early-maturing subcortical network, is important for emergence of this attentional bias - however, empirical data to support these assertions are lacking. In this prospective longitudinal study, we measured amygdala volumes from MR images in 65 healthy neonates at 2-5 weeks of gestation corrected age and attention disengagement from fearful vs. non-fearful facial expressions at 8 months with eye tracking. Overall, infants were less likely to disengage from fearful than happy/neutral faces, demonstrating an age-typical bias for fear. Left, but not right, amygdala volume (corrected for intracranial volume) was positively associated with the likelihood of disengaging attention from fearful faces to a salient lateral distractor (r = .302, p = .014). No association was observed with the disengagement from neutral or happy faces in equivalent conditions (r = .166 and .125, p = .186 and .320, respectively). These results are the first to link the amygdala volume with the emerging perceptual vigilance for fearful faces during infancy. They suggest a link from the prenatally defined variability in the amygdala size to early postnatal emotional and social traits.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jetro J Tuulari
- The FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study, Turku Brain and Mind Center, Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Turku, Finland; Department of Psychiatry, Turku University Hospital, University of Turku, Turku, Finland; Turku Collegium for Science and Medicine, University of Turku, Turku, Finland; Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, UK (Sigrid Juselius Fellowship), United Kingdom.
| | - Eeva-Leena Kataja
- The FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study, Turku Brain and Mind Center, Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Turku, Finland; Department of Psychology, University of Turku, Finland; Infant Cognition Laboratory, Center for Child Health Research, School of Medicine, University of Tampere, Finland
| | - Jukka M Leppänen
- Infant Cognition Laboratory, Center for Child Health Research, School of Medicine, University of Tampere, Finland
| | - John D Lewis
- Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
| | - Saara Nolvi
- The FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study, Turku Brain and Mind Center, Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Turku, Finland; Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, Department of Psychology and Speech-Language Pathology, University of Turku, Finland
| | - Tuomo Häikiö
- Department of Psychology, University of Turku, Finland
| | - Satu J Lehtola
- The FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study, Turku Brain and Mind Center, Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Turku, Finland
| | - Niloofar Hashempour
- The FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study, Turku Brain and Mind Center, Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Turku, Finland
| | - Jani Saunavaara
- Department of Medical Physics, Turku University Hospital, Turku, Finland
| | - Noora M Scheinin
- The FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study, Turku Brain and Mind Center, Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Turku, Finland; Department of Psychiatry, Turku University Hospital, University of Turku, Turku, Finland
| | - Riikka Korja
- The FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study, Turku Brain and Mind Center, Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Turku, Finland; Department of Psychology, University of Turku, Finland
| | - Linnea Karlsson
- The FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study, Turku Brain and Mind Center, Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Turku, Finland; Turku University Hospital and University of Turku, Department of Child Psychiatry, Finland; Centre for Population Health Research, University of Turku and Turku University Hospital, Finland
| | - Hasse Karlsson
- The FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study, Turku Brain and Mind Center, Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Turku, Finland; Department of Psychiatry, Turku University Hospital, University of Turku, Turku, Finland; Centre for Population Health Research, University of Turku and Turku University Hospital, Finland
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