Abstract
BackgroundHuman parental care relies heavily on the ability to monitor and respond to a child’s affective states. The current study examined pupil diameter as a potential physiological index of mothers’ affective response to infant facial expressions.MethodsPupillary time-series were measured from 86 mothers of young infants in response to an array of photographic infant faces falling into four emotive categories based on valence (positive vs. negative) and arousal (mild vs. strong).ResultsPupil dilation was highly sensitive to the valence of facial expressions, being larger for negative vs. positive facial expressions. A separate control experiment with luminance-matched non-face stimuli indicated that the valence effect was specific to facial expressions and cannot be explained by luminance confounds. Pupil response was not sensitive to the arousal level of facial expressions.ConclusionsThe results show the feasibility of using pupil diameter as a marker of mothers’ affective responses to ecologically valid infant stimuli and point to a particularly prompt maternal response to infant distress cues.
Highlights
Human parental care relies heavily on the ability to monitor and respond to a child’s affective states
The effects of Valence on pupil size were inspected separately from the two different time-windows, and further, separately within the face and the non-face condition. The purpose of these further analyses was to determine whether the effect of Valence on pupil size differed between the face condition, with genuine emotional signals, and the non-face condition, without emotional content
Our current results indicate that pupil diameter is a sensitive marker of emotional processes elicited by infant facial expressions in the targeted participant group of mothers of infant children
Summary
Human parental care relies heavily on the ability to monitor and respond to a child’s affective states. The current study examined pupil diameter as a potential physiological index of mothers’ affective response to infant facial expressions. To begin examining whether pupil diameter is a sensitive index of parents’ physiological responses to children’s affective cues, the present study focused on mothers’ responses to infant facial expressions. Despite increasing involvement of fathers in childcare in many societies and the need for research on biological bases of paternal childcare, there are known intersex differences in the neural and hormonal bases for caregiving behaviors [3]. For this reason, we limited our current investigation on parental responsiveness to infant emotion to mothers rather than sampling parents of both sexes. Mothers, compared to nulliparous women, show more marked early frontal (∼100 ms) event-related potentials to infant facial expressions, as well as more pronounced modulation of posterior visual responses to infant faces
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