Containment and contentment

Infant Behavior and Development, 2012

Social smiling is universally regarded as being an infant's first facial expression of pleasure. Underlying co-constructivist emotion theories are the assumptions that the emergence of social smiling is bound to experiences of face-to-face interactions with caregivers and the impact of two developmental mechanisms-maternal and infant imitation. We analyzed mother-infant interactions from two different socio-cultural contexts and hypothesized that cross-cultural differences in face-to-face interactions determine the occurrence of both of these mechanisms and of the frequency of social smiling by 12-week-old infants. Twenty mother-infant dyads from a socio-cultural community with many face-to-face interactions (German families, Münster) were compared with 24 mother-infant dyads from a sociocultural community with few such interactions (rural Nso families, Cameroon) when the infants were aged 6 and 12 weeks. When infants were 6 weeks old, mothers and their infants from both cultural communities smiled at each other for similar (albeit very short) amounts of time and used imitated each other's smiling similarly rarely. In contrast, when infants were 12 weeks old, mothers and their infants from Münster smiled at and imitated each other more often than did Nso mothers and their infants.

Infant Behavior & Development, 2009

Changes in the organization of infant looking, facial expressions, and vocalizations were examined over age (4, 7, and 10 months) and with different social partners. Although infants at all ages accompanied smiling with looking at both mothers and unfamiliar partners, 7and 10-month infants accompanied vocalization with looking only when they were with mothers. Seven-and 10-month-olds vocalized with unfamiliar partners only when they were smiling at the same time. When mothers stopped talking, infants reduced smiling significantly at all ages, yet vocalized more at 10 months. In the second half of the first year, there are fundamental changes in the coordination of infant expressive behaviors that reveal a keen attunement to variations in maternal behavior and the familiarity of social partners.

Infant Behavior and Development, 1978

Forty-eight mother-father pairs watched a 6-minute videotape presentation of an infant during which time their skin conductance and blood pressure (systolic and diastolic) were monitored. Mood scales were also administered. Half of the subjects saw a crying baby, while the other half viewed a smiling infant. The baby was labeled as "normal," "difficult," or "premature," to equal proportions of the sample. All parents completed standard questionnaires concerning their own child. The smiling infant triggered positive emotions and negligible changes in autonomic arousal, whereas a crying infant was perceived as aversive and elicited diastolic blood-pressure and skin-conductance increases. Skin-conductance increases were especially apparent when the infant was described as "premature." Mothers and fathers did not differ either in their responses to the stimulus baby or in their perception of their own child.

Social Development, 2000

Different types of infant smiles in the family of positive emotions were investigated during two mother-infant games: peekaboo and tickle. There were 27 6-month-old infants and 28 12-month-olds. Infant smiles were coded as simple (lip corner retraction only), Duchenne (simple plus cheek raising), play (simple plus jaw drop), and duplay (simple plus cheek raise and jaw drop). Results show that each type of smile has a systematic pattern of association with the game (peekaboo or tickle), component (setup or climax), trial (six trials for each game), and the direction of the infant's gaze. No significant age differences were found. We conclude that when smiling, infants may experience qualitatively different kinds of enjoyment during these two games: enjoyment of readiness to engage in play (simple smiles while gazing at mother during peekaboo), enjoyment of relief (simple smiles while gazing away from mother after being tickled), enjoyment of participation and agency (Duchenne smiles with gaze at mother during the climax of early tickle game trials), enjoyment of escape (Duchenne smiles while gazing away during tickle climax), and enjoyment of buildup (duplay smiles during the climax of later trials). These findings show that the same facial action, smiling, can reflect different positive emotions depending upon cooccurring facial actions and the dynamics of the social process, and that the positive emotional experience of infants as young as six months is more complex than previously reported.

Scientific Reports, 2016

By two-three months, infants show active social expressions during face-to-face interactions. These interactions are important, as they provide the foundation for later emotional regulation and cognition, but little is known about how infant social expressiveness develops. We considered two different accounts. One emphasizes the contingency of parental responsiveness, regardless of its form; the other, the functional architecture account, emphasizes the preparedness of both infants and parents to respond in specific ways to particular forms of behaviour in their partner. We videotaped motherinfant interactions from one to nine weeks, and analysed them with a micro-analytic coding scheme. Infant social expressiveness increased through the nine-week period, particularly after 3 weeks. This development was unrelated to the extent of maternal contingent responsiveness, even to infant social expressions. By contrast, specific forms of response that mothers used preferentially for infant social expressions-mirroring, marking with a smile-predicted the increase in these infant behaviours over time. These results support a functional architecture account of the perceptual and behavioural predispositions of infants and parents that allow young infants to capitalize on relatively limited exposure to specific parental behaviours, in order to develop important social capacities.

Journal of Communication, 1977

A primary task of early face-to-face interaction between human infants a n d their parents and other adults is the regulation of mutuality, the achievement of intersubjectivity. W e have studied (1, 2 ) the development of mutuality through videotaped episodes of face-to-face interactions between adults a n d infants. Each of their expressive displays was first described and then the descriptions were scaled to reflect the degree of affective and attentional involvement in the interaction. The scaled scores for the infant and adult were then graphically and mathematically compared to each other to assess the extent to which mutual regulation occurred.

Infancy, 2004

When do infants begin to communicate positive affect about physical objects to their social partners? We examined developmental changes in the timing of smiles during episodes of initiating joint attention that involved an infant gazing between an object and a social partner. Twenty-six typically developing infants were observed at 8, 10, and 12 months during the Early Social-Communication Scales, a semistructured assessment for eliciting initiating joint attention and related behaviors. The proportion of infant smiling during initiating joint attention episodes did not change with age, but there was a change in the timing of the smiles. The likelihood of infants smiling at an object and then gazing at the experimenter while smiling (anticipatory smiling) increased between 8 and 10 months and remained stable between 10 and 12 months. The increase in the number of infants who smiled at an object and then made eye contact suggests a developing ability to communicate positive affect about an object.

Developmental Psychology, 1986

Previous studies have demonstrated that 1 -year-old infants look toward their mothers' facial expressions and use the emotional information conveyed. In this study, 46 1-year-olds were confronted with an unusual toy in a context where an experimenter familiar to the infants posed either happy or fearful expressions and where their mothers were present but did not provide facial signals. Most of the infants (83%) referenced the familiarized stranger. Once the adult's facial signals were noted, the infant's instrumental behaviors and expressive responses to the toy were influenced in the direction of the affective valence of the adult's expression. The results indicate that infants may be influenced by the emotional expressions of a much broader group of adults than has previously been recognized.

Developmental Psychology, 1980

Thirty-seven infants were videotaped in face-to-face play with their mothers at 6, 13, and 26 weeks of age. Analysis proceeded at three levels: (a) The infants' periods of attention toward the mothers significantly overlapped with the mothers' facially expressive behavior. This was increasingly true as the infants grew older: Whereas the total proportion of time looking at the mothers decreased, the time looking at them while they were on did not decrease, (b) The infants' Vocalizations, Smiles, and Mouth Openings clustered into "runs" as described by previous investigators, but at 6 weeks these occurred only when the mothers were on. By 26 weeks of age, the infants' clusters of expression had become autonomous turns in a dialoguelike exchange, (c) Analysis of contingent sequences following the onset of infant attention showed that with infants 6 weeks old, mothers' facial greetings-Nodding, Smiling, and so forth-were only rarely effective in eliciting expressive greetings from the infants, but without the mothers' greetings the infants almost never made such responses. With 13-week-old infants, mothers more easily elicited greetings, and some spontaneous (unelicited) greetings by the infants could also be seen. With 26-week-old infants, the spontaneous greetings had become as frequent as those elicited by the mothers. Cognitive development demands a widening of the infant's horizons beyond the mother's face to include other animate objects and their actions as well as inanimate objects and their motions. Thus, infants' preferences change over the first 6 months so that faces, especially mothers' faces, occupy a declining share of their attention (Schaffer, 1977). Maternal behavior might be expected to change in response to this shift in infant preferences. Mothers might use more varied and exaggerated expressions (Brazelton, Koslowski, & Main, 1974; Stern, Beebe, Jaffe, & Bennett, 1977) to compete against other objects for infants' attention, for the This work was supported by the Spencer Foundation. We are grateful to Richard Nachman for his collaboration in recruiting the sample; to Lynn Barker, Bonnie Umeh, Stephen Muka, and the many coders who contributed their time and vision to the project. Requests for reprints should be sent to Kenneth

Abstract To better understand early positive emotional expression, automated software measurements of facial action were supplemented with anatomically based manual coding. These convergent measurements were used to describe the dynamics of infant smiling and predict perceived positive emotional intensity. Over the course of infant smiles, degree of smile strength varied with degree of cheek raising, which varied with degree of mouth opening.