Lowe Jean R, Coulombe Patrick, Moss Natalia C, Rieger Rebecca E, Aragón Crystal, MacLean Peggy C, Caprihan Arvind, Phillips John P, Handal Alexis J
Department of Pediatrics, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, United States.
Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, United States.
Infant Behav Dev. 2016 Aug;44:110-20. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2016.06.009. Epub 2016 Jun 27.
Touch between mother and infant plays an important role in development starting from birth. Cross-cultural differences surrounding rearing practices have an influence on parent-infant interaction, including types of touch used and the development of emotional regulation. This study was designed to investigate maternal touch and infant emotional regulation in infant-mother dyads from Ecuador (n=25) and Hispanic dyads from the United States (US) (n=26). Mothers and their 4-month-old full-term infants participated in the Still Face Paradigm. Second-by-second coding of maternal touch and infant affect was completed. Overall the analyses showed that Ecuadorian mothers used more nurturing and accompaniment touch and less attention seeking touch than US Hispanic mothers during the pre-stressor (baseline) episode. Lagged multilevel models were used to investigate the effect of the different types of touch on infant emotional regulation in the groups for the episodes. The data suggest that playful touch had a significant increase in infant affect, whereas accompaniment and attention-seeking touch had a significant decrease in infant affect. Overall, this study provides support for the role of touch in mother-infant synchronicity in relation to infant's emotional regulation. Identifying touch that is more calming is important to foster emotional regulation in infancy, which can have important implications for development.
从婴儿出生起，母婴之间的接触就在其发育过程中发挥着重要作用。围绕养育方式的跨文化差异会影响亲子互动，包括所使用的接触类型以及情绪调节的发展。本研究旨在调查来自厄瓜多尔的母婴二元组（n = 25）和来自美国的西班牙裔母婴二元组（n = 26）中的母亲接触行为和婴儿情绪调节情况。母亲及其4个月大的足月儿参与了静脸范式实验。对母亲的接触行为和婴儿的情感反应进行了逐秒编码。总体分析表明，在应激前（基线）阶段，厄瓜多尔母亲比美国西班牙裔母亲使用了更多的关爱和陪伴性接触，而寻求关注的接触较少。使用滞后多水平模型来研究不同类型的接触对各实验组在不同阶段婴儿情绪调节的影响。数据表明，嬉戏性接触会使婴儿的情感反应显著增加，而陪伴性和寻求关注的接触则会使婴儿的情感反应显著减少。总体而言，本研究为接触行为在母婴同步性中对婴儿情绪调节的作用提供了支持。识别出更能让婴儿平静的接触行为对于促进婴儿期的情绪调节很重要，这可能对其发育产生重要影响。
