Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, UK.
Dev Sci. 2014 Jan;17(1):35-46. doi: 10.1111/desc.12090. Epub 2013 Sep 13.
Infant facial cues play a critical role in eliciting care and nurturance from an adult caregiver. Using an attentional capture paradigm we investigated attentional processing of adult and infant emotional facial expressions in a sample of mothers (n = 29) and non-mothers (n = 37) to determine whether infant faces were associated with greater task interference. Responses to infant target stimuli were slower than adult target stimuli in both groups. This effect was modulated by parental status, such that mothers compared to non-mothers showed longer response times to infant compared to adult faces. Both groups also responded more slowly to emotional faces, an effect that was more marked for infant emotional faces. Finally, it was found that greater levels of mothers' self-reported parental distress was associated with less task interference when processing infant faces. These findings indicate that for adult women, infant faces in general and emotional infant faces in particular, preferentially engage attention compared to adult faces. However, for mothers, infant faces appear to be more salient in general. Therefore, infant faces may constitute a special class of social stimuli. We suggest that alterations in attentional processing in motherhood may constitute an adaptive behavioural change associated with becoming a parent.
婴儿的面部表情在引起成人照顾者的关怀和养育方面起着至关重要的作用。我们使用注意捕获范式，在一组母亲（n=29）和非母亲（n=37）中研究了成人和婴儿情绪面部表情的注意加工，以确定婴儿面孔是否与更大的任务干扰有关。在两组中，对婴儿目标刺激的反应都比成人目标刺激慢。这种效应受父母身份的调节，即与非母亲相比，母亲对婴儿面孔的反应时间比成人面孔长。两组对情绪面孔的反应也较慢，这种效应在婴儿情绪面孔上更为明显。最后，发现母亲自我报告的父母困扰程度越高，在处理婴儿面孔时任务干扰越小。这些发现表明，对于成年女性来说，一般来说，婴儿面孔，特别是情绪婴儿面孔，与成人面孔相比更能优先吸引注意力。然而，对于母亲来说，婴儿面孔在一般情况下更为突出。因此，婴儿面孔可能构成一类特殊的社会刺激。我们认为，母性中注意力加工的改变可能是与成为父母相关的一种适应性行为变化。
