Measuring naturalistic proximity as a window into caregiver-child interaction patterns

Tracking real-time proximity in daily life: A new tool to examine social interactions

Social interactions, spending time together, and relationships are important for individuals' well-being, with people feeling happier when they spend more time with others. So far, most information about the frequency and duration of spending time together is based on self-report questionnaires. Although recent technological innovations have stimulated the development of objective approaches for measuring physical proximity in humans in everyday life, these methods still have substantial limitations. Here we present a novel method, using Bluetooth low-energy beacons and a smartphone application, to measure the frequency and duration of dyads being in close proximity in daily life. This method can also be used to link the frequency and duration of proximity to the quality of interactions, by using proximity-triggered questionnaires. We examined the use of this novel method by exploring proximity patterns of family interactions among 233 participants (77 Dutch families, with 77 adolescents [Mage = 15.9] and 145 parents [Mage = 48.9]) for 14 consecutive days. Overall, proximity-based analyses indicated that adolescents were more often and longer in proximity to mothers than to fathers, with large differences between families in frequency and duration. Proximity-triggered evaluations of the interactions and parenting behavior were generally positive for both fathers and mothers. This innovative method is a promising tool that can be broadly used in other social contexts to yield new and more detailed insights into social proximity in daily life.

Daylong egocentric recordings in small- and large-scale language communities: A practical introduction

Daylong egocentric (i.e., participant-centered) recordings promise an unprecedented view into the experiences that drive early language learning, impacting both assumptions and theories about how learning happens. Thanks to recent advances in technology, collecting long-form audio, photo, and video recordings with child-worn devices is cheaper and more convenient than ever. These recording methods can be similarly deployed across small- and large-scale language communities around the world, opening up enormous possibilities for comparative research on early language development. However, building new high-quality naturalistic corpora is a massive investment of time and money. In this chapter, we provide a practical look into considerations relevant for developing and managing daylong egocentric recording projects: Is it possible to re-use existing data? How much time will manual annotation take? Can automated tools sufficiently tackle the questions at hand? We conclude by outlining two exciting directions for future naturalistic child language research.

Natural behavior in everyday settings

Infant behaviors-walking, vocalizing, playing, interacting with others, and so on-offer an unparalleled window into learning and development. The study of infants requires strategic choices about what to observe, where, when, and how. We argue that loosening study constraints-by allowing infants and caregivers to do whatever they choose, wherever they choose, and with whatever materials they choose-promises to reveal a deep understanding of the everyday data on which learning builds. We show that observations of infants' natural behavior yield unique insights into the nature of visual exploration, object play, posture and locomotion, proximity to caregiver, and communication. Furthermore, we show that by situating the study of behavior in ecologically-valid settings, researchers can gain purchase on the contextual regularities that frame learning. We close by underscoring the value of studies at every point on the research continuum-from cleverly controlled lab-based tasks to fully natural observations in everyday environments. Acceleration in the science of behavior rests on leveraging expertise across disciplines, theoretical positions, and methodological approaches.

Automatic assessment of infant carrying and holding using at-home wearable recordings

Assessing infant carrying and holding (C/H), or physical infant-caregiver interaction, is important for a wide range of contexts in development research. An automated detection and quantification of infant C/H is particularly needed in long term at-home studies where development of infants' neurobehavior is measured using wearable devices. Here, we first developed a phenomenological categorization for physical infant-caregiver interactions to support five different definitions of C/H behaviors. Then, we trained and assessed deep learning-based classifiers for their automatic detection from multi-sensor wearable recordings that were originally used for mobile assessment of infants' motor development. Our results show that an automated C/H detection is feasible at few-second temporal accuracy. With the best C/H definition, the automated detector shows 96% accuracy and 0.56 kappa, which is slightly less than the video-based inter-rater agreement between trained human experts (98% accuracy, 0.77 kappa). The classifier performance varies with C/H definition reflecting the extent to which infants' movements are present in each C/H variant. A systematic benchmarking experiment shows that the widely used actigraphy-based method ignores the normally occurring C/H behaviors. Finally, we show proof-of-concept for the utility of the novel classifier in studying C/H behavior across infant development. Particularly, we show that matching the C/H detections to individuals' gross motor ability discloses novel insights to infant-parent interaction.

Caregiving relationships are a cornerstone of developmental psychopathology

The interdisciplinary field of developmental psychopathology has made great strides by including context into theoretical and empirical approaches to studying risk and resilience. Perhaps no context is more important to the developing child than their relationships with their caregivers (typically a child's parents), as caregivers are a key source of stimulation and nurturance to young children. Coupled with the high degree of brain plasticity in the earliest years of life, these caregiving relationships have an immense influence on shaping behavioral outcomes relevant to developmental psychopathology. In this article, we discuss three areas within caregiving relationships: (1) caregiver-child interactions in everyday, naturalistic settings; (2) caregivers' social cognitions about their child; and (3) caregivers' broader social and cultural context. For each area, we provide an overview of its significance to the field, identify existing knowledge gaps, and offer potential approaches for bridging these gaps to foster growth in the field. Lastly, given that one value of a scientific discipline is its ability to produce research useful in guiding real-world decisions related to policy and practice, we encourage developmental psychopathology to consider that a focus on caregiving, a modifiable target, supports this mission.

The next generation of developmental psychopathology research: Including broader perspectives and becoming more precise

The current Special Issue marks a major milestone in the history of developmental psychopathology; as the final issue edited by Cicchetti, we have an opportunity to reflect on the remarkable progress of the discipline across the last four decades, as well as challenges and future directions for the field. With contemporary issues in mind, including rising rates of psychopathology, health disparities, and international conflict, as well as rapid growth and accessibility of digital and mobile technologies, the discipline of developmental psychopathology is poised to advance multidisciplinary, developmentally- and contextually- informed research, and to make substantial progress in supporting the healthy development of individuals around the world. We highlight key future directions and challenges for the next generation of developmental psychopathology research including further investigation of culture at multiple levels of analysis, incorporation of macro-level influences into developmental psychopathology research, methods advances to address heterogeneity in translational research, precision mental health, and the extension of developmental psychopathology research across the lifespan.

Auditory chaos classification in real-world environments

Background & motivation

Household chaos is an established risk factor for child development. However, current methods for measuring household chaos rely on parent surveys, meaning existing research efforts cannot disentangle potentially dynamic bidirectional relations between high chaos environments and child behavior problems.

Proposed approach

We train and make publicly available a classifier to provide objective, high-resolution predictions of household chaos from real-world child-worn audio recordings. To do so, we collect and annotate a novel dataset of ground-truth auditory chaos labels compiled from over 411 h of daylong recordings collected via audio recorders worn by N = 22 infants in their homes. We leverage an existing sound event classifier to identify candidate high chaos segments, increasing annotation efficiency 8.32× relative to random sampling.

Result

Our best-performing model successfully classifies four levels of real-world household auditory chaos with a macro F1 score of 0.701 (Precision: 0.705, Recall: 0.702) and a weighted F1 score of 0.679 (Precision: 0.685, Recall: 0.680).

Significance

In future work, high-resolution objective chaos predictions from our model can be leveraged for basic science and intervention, including testing theorized mechanisms by which chaos affects children's cognition and behavior. Additionally, to facilitate further model development we make publicly available the first and largest balanced annotated audio dataset of real-world household chaos.

Infant Placement and Language Exposure in Daily Life

Children's daily contexts shape their experiences. In this study we assessed whether variations in infant placement (e.g., held, bouncy seat) are associated with infants' exposure to adult speech. Using repeated survey sampling of mothers and continuous audio recordings, we tested whether use of independence-supporting placements was associated with adult speech exposure in a Southeastern U.S. sample of 60 4- to 6- month- old infants (38% male, predominately White, not Hispanic/Latinx, from higher SES households). Within-subject analyses indicated that independence-supporting placements were associated with exposure to fewer adult words in the moment. Between-subjects analyses indicated that infants more frequently reported to be in independence-supporting placements that also provided posture support (i.e., exersaucer) were exposed to fewer adult words and less consistent adult speech across the day. These findings indicate that infants' opportunities for exposure to adult speech "in the wild" may vary based on immediate physical context.

Interpersonal synchronization of spontaneously generated body movements

Interpersonal movement synchrony (IMS) is central to social behavior in several species. In humans, IMS is typically studied using structured tasks requiring participants to produce specific body movements. Instead, spontaneously generated (i.e., not instructed) movements have received less attention. To test whether spontaneous movements synchronize interpersonally, we recorded full-body kinematics from dyads of participants who were only asked to sit face-to-face and to look at each other. We manipulated interpersonal (i) visual contact and (ii) spatial proximity. We found that spontaneous movements synchronized across participants only when they could see each other and regardless of interpersonal spatial proximity. This synchronization emerged very rapidly and did not selectively entail homologous body parts (as in mimicry); rather, the synchrony generalized to nearly all possible combinations of body parts. Hence, spontaneous behavior alone can lead to IMS. More generally, our results highlight that IMS can be studied under natural and unconstrained conditions.

Maternal symptoms of depression and anxiety during the postpartum period moderate infants' neural response to emotional faces of their mother and of female strangers

Affective exchanges between mothers and infants are key to the intergenerational transmission of depression and anxiety, possibly via adaptations in neural systems that support infants' attention to facial affect. The current study examined associations between postnatal maternal symptoms of depression, panic and social anxiety, maternal parenting behaviours, and infants' neural responses to emotional facial expressions portrayed by their mother and by female strangers. The Negative Central (Nc), an event-related potential component that indexes attention to salient stimuli and is sensitive to emotional expression, was recorded from 30 infants. Maternal sensitivity, intrusiveness, and warmth, as well as infant's positive engagement with their mothers, were coded from unstructured interactions. Mothers reporting higher levels of postnatal depression symptoms were rated by coders as less sensitive and warm, and their infants exhibited decreased positive engagement with the mothers. In contrast, postnatal maternal symptoms of panic and social anxiety were not significantly associated with experimenter-rated parenting behaviours. Additionally, infants of mothers reporting greater postnatal depression symptoms showed a smaller Nc to their own mother's facial expressions, whereas infants of mothers endorsing greater postnatal symptoms of panic demonstrated a larger Nc to fearful facial expressions posed by both their mother and female strangers. Together, these results suggest that maternal symptoms of depression and anxiety during the postpartum period have distinct effects on infants' neural responses to parent and stranger displays of emotion.

Caregiver-child proximity as a dimension of early experience

Human infancy and early childhood is both a time of heightened brain plasticity and responsivity to the environment as well as a developmental period of dependency on caregivers for survival, nurturance, and stimulation. Across primate species and human evolutionary history, close contact between infants and caregivers is species-expected. As children develop, caregiver-child proximity patterns change as children become more autonomous. In addition to developmental changes, there is variation in caregiver-child proximity across cultures and families, with potential implications for child functioning. We propose that caregiver-child proximity is an important dimension for understanding early environments, given that interactions between children and their caregivers are a primary source of experience-dependent learning. We review approaches for operationalizing this construct (e.g., touch, physical distance) and highlight studies that illustrate how caregiver-child proximity can be measured. Drawing on the concepts proposed in dimensional models of adversity, we consider how caregiver-child proximity may contribute to our understanding of children's early experiences. Finally, we discuss future directions in caregiver-child proximity research with the goal of understanding the link between early experiences and child adaptive and maladaptive functioning.

Digital Technologies for Emotion-Regulation Assessment and Intervention: A Conceptual Review

The ability to regulate emotions in response to stress is central to healthy development. While early research in emotion regulation predominantly employed static, self-report measurement, the past decade has seen a shift in focus toward understanding the dynamic nature of regulation processes. This is reflected in recent refinements in the definition of emotion regulation, which emphasize the importance of the ability to flexibly adapt regulation efforts across contexts. The latest proliferation of digital technologies employed in mental health research offers the opportunity to capture the state- and context-sensitive nature of emotion regulation. In this conceptual review, we examine the use of digital technologies (ecological momentary assessment; wearable and smartphone technology, physical activity, acoustic data, visual data, and geo-location; smart home technology; virtual reality; social media) in the assessment of emotion regulation and describe their application to interventions. We also discuss challenges and ethical considerations, and outline areas for future research.

Tracking Infant Development With a Smartphone: A Practical Guide to the Experience Sampling Method

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced developmental researchers to rethink their traditional research practices. The growing need to study infant development at a distance has shifted our research paradigm to online and digital monitoring of infants and families, using electronic devices, such as smartphones. In this practical guide, we introduce the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) – a research method to collect data, in the moment, on multiple occasions over time – for examining infant development at a distance. ESM is highly suited for assessing dynamic processes of infant development and family dynamics, such as parent-infant interactions and parenting practices. It can also be used to track highly fluctuating family dynamics (e.g., infant and parental mood or behavior) and routines (e.g., activity levels and feeding practices). The aim of the current paper was to provide an overview by explaining what ESM is and for what types of research ESM is best suited. Next, we provide a brief step-by-step guide on how to start and run an ESM study, including preregistration, development of a questionnaire, using wearables and other hardware, planning and design considerations, and examples of possible analysis techniques. Finally, we discuss common pitfalls of ESM research and how to avoid them.

Characterizing the Brain Structural Adaptations Across the Motherhood Transition

Women that become mothers face notable physiological adaptations during this life-period. Neuroimaging studies of the last decade have provided grounded evidence that women's brains structurally change across the transition into motherhood. The characterization of this brain remodeling is currently in its early years of research. The current article reviews this scientific field by focusing on our longitudinal (pre-to-post pregnancy) Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) studies in first-time parents and other longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of parents. We present the questions that are currently being answered by the parental brain literature and point out those that have not yet been explored. We also highlight potential confounding variables that need to be considered when analyzing and interpreting brain changes observed during motherhood.