Infrared Imaging Lab, Institute of Advanced Biomedical Technologies, G. d'Annunzio University Chieti-Pescara, Italy ; Department of Neuroscience and Imaging, G. d'Annunzio University Chieti-Pescara, Italy.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2013 Jun 25;7:299. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00299. eCollection 2013.
Maternal attunement with an infant's emotional states is thought to represent a distinctive feature of the human primary bond. It implies the mother's ability of empathizing with her child in order to fulfil the child's needs in an immediate and appropriate manner. Thus, it is particularly involved in stressful situations. By assuming that maternal attunement embodies a direct sharing of physiological responses with the child, we compared the autonomic response of mothers observing their own distressed child with those of other women observing an unknown child involved in an ecological distressful condition (mishap paradigm). The hypothesis was that the adult's response was more attuned with the child's response in the former group than in the latter group. The autonomic response was non-invasively evaluated through the recording of the thermal facial imprints by means of thermal infrared (IR) imaging. Nine mother-child dyads and 9 woman-unknown child dyads were studied. We found marked similarities between the facial temperature dynamics of women and children along the experimental procedure, thus providing evidence for a direct emotional sharing within the adult-child dyad. The evidence for common dynamics in the time course of the temperatures was assessed through correlation analysis and, nevertheless, resulted stronger in the mother-child dyads than in the other women-child dyads. In addition, temporal analysis showed a faster response in mothers than in other women, thus confirming our study hypothesis. Besides confirming the extraordinary capability of IR imaging to preserve ecological context in the study of social or non-verbal interactions, these results suggest that maternity appears to potentiate the emotional attunement with the child. Although based on preliminary results, this study opens new perspectives in the study of the factors modulating vicarious socio-emotional processes.
母亲与婴儿的情绪状态的共鸣被认为是人类主要联系的一个独特特征。它意味着母亲能够共情她的孩子，以便以即时和适当的方式满足孩子的需求。因此，它特别涉及到紧张的情况。通过假设母亲的共鸣体现了与孩子生理反应的直接分享，我们比较了观察自己痛苦的孩子的母亲的自主反应与观察处于生态困境（意外范式）中不熟悉的孩子的其他女性的自主反应。假设是，在前者组中，成人的反应比后者组更与孩子的反应相协调。自主反应通过使用热红外（IR）成像记录热面部印记来进行非侵入性评估。研究了 9 对母婴和 9 对女性-陌生儿童对。我们发现，在实验过程中，女性和儿童的面部温度动态之间存在明显的相似之处，从而为成人-儿童对之间的直接情感分享提供了证据。通过相关分析评估了温度时间过程中共同动态的证据，但在母婴对中比在其他女性-儿童对中更强。此外，时间分析显示母亲的反应比其他女性更快，从而证实了我们的研究假设。除了确认 IR 成像在研究社会或非言语互动时保持生态背景的非凡能力外，这些结果还表明，母亲身份似乎增强了与孩子的情感共鸣。尽管基于初步结果，但这项研究为调节替代社会情感过程的因素研究开辟了新的视角。
