Abstract
Despite a growing body of work examining the expression of infants’ positive emotion in joint attention contexts, few studies have examined the moment-by-moment dynamics of emotional signaling by adults interacting with babies in these contexts. We invited 73 parents of infants (three fathers) to our laboratory, comprising parent-infant dyads with babies at 6 (n = 15), 9 (n = 15), 12 (n = 15), 15 (n = 14), and 18 (n = 14) months of age. Parents were asked to sit in a chair centered on the long axis of a room and to point to distant dolls (2.5 m) when the dolls were animated, while holding their children in their laps. We found that parents displayed the highest levels of smiling at the same time that they pointed, thus demonstrating affective/referential synchrony in their infant-directed communication. There were no discernable differences in this pattern among parents with children of different ages. Thus, parents spontaneously encapsulated episodes of joint attention with positive emotion.
Highlights
Joint attention is the ability to capture and re-direct the attention of a social partner, and to follow another’s communicative cues to a specific locus (e.g., Moore and Dunham, 1995; Bard and Leavens, 2009; Leavens and Racine, 2009; Seemann, 2012)
Joint attention refers to a suite of triadic communicative skills that typically develop in humans and apes late in their infancy periods, near the end of the first year of life, and includes such behavioral developments as pointing, following the pointing and gaze direction of others, using emotional information from a caregiver to regulate one’s response to novel objects, and other tactics involving the coordination of attention to a common focus (e.g., Carpenter et al, 1998; Butterworth, 2001; Striano and Bertin, 2005; Racine and Carpendale, 2007; Bard et al, 2014)
Levels of parental smiling within the “HIGH” level did not differ statistically in pairwise comparisons, but they did differ from smiling levels in INTERMEDIATE and LOW, and this pattern held for all three levels of smiling, with only one exception: within the LOW category, smiling during the second interval, DOLL ON −3 s, was statistically lower than both of the immediate adjacent levels, labeled LOW, but stood in an identical relation with these adjacent intervals to all intervals labeled HIGH and INTERMEDIATE
Summary
Joint attention is the ability to capture and re-direct the attention of a social partner, and to follow another’s communicative cues to a specific locus (e.g., Moore and Dunham, 1995; Bard and Leavens, 2009; Leavens and Racine, 2009; Seemann, 2012). Carpenter and Liebal (2012) have described, in conceptual terms, the role of mutual visual regard with positive affect between babies and their parents as a kind of acknowledgment of the mutual awareness of the jointness of the interactions, the idea being that babies and their mothers acknowledge the shared nature of these joint attention episodes with mutual gaze and smiles. These findings and conceptual advancements were presaged by Hobson (1993), who speculated that “the development of a child’s awareness of propositional attitudes might begin with more or less direct perception of other people’s affective attitudes” These affective landscapes may have significant bearing on infants’ motivations to follow into another person’s focus of attention, for example, following their pointing gestures or their line of regard
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