Department of Philosophy, Education, and Psychology, University of Verona.
Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca.
Dev Psychol. 2019 Sep;55(9):1850-1867. doi: 10.1037/dev0000696.
Studies conducted in Western countries document the special role of mother-infant face-to-face exchanges for early emotional development including social smiling. A few cross-cultural studies have shown that the Western pattern of face-to-face communication is absent in traditional rural cultures, without identifying other processes that promote emotional Co-regulation. The present study compared three different samples: Western middle-class families in Italy, rural traditional Nso farmer families in Cameroon, and West African sub-Saharan immigrant families in Italy using biweekly observations of 20 mother-infant dyads from each cultural context from age 4 to 12 weeks. Longitudinal sequential analysis of maternal and infant behaviors showed that from as early as 4 weeks, in Italian dyads maternal affectionate talking is linked with infant active attention to mother in sequences of face-to-face contact; this link fosters the subsequent emergence of infant smiling/cooing, and then sequences of positive feedback between infant and maternal emotional expressions that, by the 3rd month, dynamically stabilize. In contrast, for Cameroonian/Nso dyads over the 2nd and 3rd month, maternal motor stimulation marked by rhythmic vocalizing is linked with infant active attention to surroundings. The relatively few smiling/cooing actions of Nso babies at their mothers were answered mainly with tactile stimulation that did not foster the maintenance of face-to-face visual contact. Finally, West African immigrant dyads showed a combination of both face-to-face and sensorimotor coregulated exchanges observed in their new and native cultures. These findings suggest that emotional Co-regulation in early infancy can occur via multiple, culture-specific pathways that may be substantially different from the western pattern of face-to-face communication. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
西方国家的研究记录了母婴面对面交流对早期情感发展的特殊作用，包括社交微笑。一些跨文化研究表明，西方的面对面交流模式在传统的农村文化中并不存在，也没有发现其他促进情感共同调节的过程。本研究比较了来自意大利的西方中产阶级家庭、喀麦隆的农村传统 Nso 农民家庭和意大利的撒哈拉以南非洲移民家庭这三个不同的样本，使用每个文化背景下 20 对母婴对的两周一次的观察，从 4 周到 12 周。母婴行为的纵向序列分析表明，早在 4 周时，在意大利母婴对中，母亲充满爱意的谈话与婴儿积极关注母亲的面对面接触序列有关；这种联系促进了婴儿微笑/咕咕声的随后出现，然后是母婴情绪表达之间的积极反馈序列，到第三个月，这种序列动态稳定。相比之下，在喀麦隆/Nso 母婴对中，在第 2 个月和第 3 个月，以有节奏的发声为标志的母亲运动刺激与婴儿对周围环境的积极关注有关。Nso 婴儿相对较少的对母亲微笑/咕咕声的反应主要是由触觉刺激引起的，这并没有促进面对面视觉接触的维持。最后，非洲西部移民母婴对表现出了他们新的和本土文化中都存在的面对面和感觉运动共同调节的交流。这些发现表明，婴儿早期的情感共同调节可以通过多种特定于文化的途径发生，这些途径可能与西方的面对面交流模式有很大的不同。
