Abstract
This study examined the association between infant facial expressions and parental motivation as well as the interaction between attachment state and expressions. Two-hundred eighteen childless adults (Mage = 19.22, 118 males, 100 females) were recruited. Participants completed the Chinese version of the State Adult Attachment Measure and the E-prime test, which comprised three components (a) liking, the specific hedonic experience in reaction to laughing, neutral, and crying infant faces; (b) representational responding, actively seeking infant faces with specific expressions; and (c) evoked responding, actively retaining images of three different infant facial expressions. While the first component refers to the “liking” of infants, the second and third components entail the “wanting” of an infant. Random intercepts multilevel models with emotion nested within participants revealed a significant interaction between secure attachment state and emotion on both liking and representational response. A hierarchical regression analysis was conducted to examine the unique contributions of secure attachment state. Findings demonstrated that, after controlling for sex, anxious, and avoidant, secure attachment state positively predicted parental motivations (liking and wanting) in the neutral and crying conditions, but not the laughing condition. These findings demonstrate the significant role of secure attachment state in parental motivation, specifically when infants display uncertain and negative emotions.
Highlights
Attachment relationships between infants and their caregivers influence the infants’ rate of survival as well as its’ social, emotional, and cognitive development (Insel and Young, 2001; Sroufe et al, 2005)
The results of this study indicated that a secure attachment state in adulthood reliably predicted the three positive components of parental motivation by comparing neutral faces of infants and adults
A baseline model without explanatory variables demonstrated that 45.58% of the total variance in the special liking toward infants was accounted for by the variation across participants
Summary
Attachment relationships between infants and their caregivers influence the infants’ rate of survival as well as its’ social, emotional, and cognitive development (Insel and Young, 2001; Sroufe et al, 2005). In the field of cognitive neuropsychology, novel methods have been adopted to assess motivation, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (Strathearn et al, 2008, 2009; Caria et al, 2012) and behavior paradigms (Yamamoto et al, 2009; Parsons et al, 2011; Charles et al, 2013) These studies include images of infants as hedonic stimuli and activation of dopamine-associated reward processing regions, or key pressing to change viewing time of infant images, as indicators of parental motivation. We used Heerey and Gold’s (2007) behavioral paradigm while simultaneously examining how infant facial expressions interact with secure attachment state and subsequently influence parental motivation among non-parents. (2) A positive interaction between attachment state and expression among childless individuals, such that the impact of secure attachment state on parental motivation, will vary according to different infant facial expressions
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