I chose this article because it deals directly with social development, parenting styles, and, in a way, emotional regulation through the guidance of a caregiver. We’ve learned throughout the course that infants and young children look to their caregiver as a source of social context and guide for appropriate behavior. We also know that infant’s have the ability to recognize their mother’s face with days of birth and are exceptionally receptive to faces in general. Children are influenced by their upbringing and we have discovered through Baumrind’s work that parenting styles can greatly affect a child’s ability to regulate emotions. This study looks at how a parent’s, specially a mother’s, behavior affects an infant’s neural processing of …show more content…
This study looks directly at how parental behavior influences the processing of emotions by 7-month-old infants. The researchers predicted that variations in parental behavior would be linked to event related potentials relating to processing of emotional faces. An event related potential is the measured brain activity resulting from the application stimuli. The researchers focused solely on Negative central (Nc) EEG components in the study to remove the possibility of multiple hypotheses. A Nc component occurs when an infant is perceptive to a new stimuli. An EEG is an electroencephalography which measures brain activity through the recording of electrical signals. The researcher’s measure of parental behavior looked directly at responsiveness and reactivity of mother’s to their infants. They also examined the interaction of parental receptiveness and infant temperament in the processing of facial emotions. The participants in this study were 77 7-month-old infants, who were full term and of healthy birth weight, and their …show more content…
The IBQ evaluates the frequency of temperamental behaviors within the last week and behavior in 6 categories; activity level, smiling and laughing, distress,and latency to approach sudden or novel stimuli distress to limitations, soothability and duration of orienting. If this study was set up like an experiment I believe the independent variable would be parental behavior and the dependent variable would be the way the infant processes emotions through EEG components. This study found that infants of mothers who were more responsive during interactions with their child showed larger Nc neural responses to happy faces compared to neutral ones. In another way, responsive parenting could simply create more exposure to positive emotional expressions, which then modifies an infant’s neural response. Among these positive infants, higher infant Nc magnitudes were registered in response to fearful faces. This finding was interpreted as evidence that fear may be an unfamiliar emotion to these children. This study supports the theory that mother-infant relationships may have a profound influence on a child’s early emotional