A new University of Virginia study has found that a new mother’s ability to recognize positive emotions of the faces of other adults predicts how sensitive and responsive she will be with her baby four months later.
A team in the Department of Psychology’s Baby Lab followed 120 mother-and-baby pairs from just after full-term deliveries to five months postpartum as part of a larger inquiry called the UVA Mom and Baby Study.
Researchers recruited study participants from UVA Health. “During that newborn period, we asked moms to look at a series of videos of faces that were expressing different emotions,” said Jessica Stern, lead author of the study. “What they had to do was watch these faces change from neutral to one of five different emotions. We had happiness, sadness, disgust, anger, fear and neutral faces.”
The videos featured adult actors. “What's interesting about this is that a mom’s ability to detect emotion in adult faces is actually predicting her sensitivity to her infant,” Stern said. “There is other research that looks at how parents respond to infant faces. One of the follow-ups we would love to do is see if there is a stronger prediction if moms were to look at the faces of their own infants.”
Stern said she has tried the task in the study herself and “it’s very challenging.”
She said some moms found it easier and others found it more difficult. “We were interested in those differences and especially interested in how moms identified happiness and fear, because we know that each of those has been linked to care behaviors in other studies. What we didn’t know was whether it would be linked to parenting behavior.”
