Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.
Department of Pediatrics, Division of Developmental Medicine, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Dev Psychobiol. 2022 Nov;64(7):e22332. doi: 10.1002/dev.22332.
Attentional biases to threat-related stimuli, such as fearful and angry facial expressions, are important to survival and emerge early in development. Infants demonstrate an attentional bias to fearful facial expressions by 5-7 months of age and an attentional bias toward anger by 3 years of age that are modulated by experiential factors. In a longitudinal study of 87 mother-infant dyads from families predominantly experiencing low income, we examined whether maternal stress and depressive symptoms were associated with trajectories of attentional biases to threat, assessed during an attention disengagement eye-tracking task when infants were 6-, 9-, and 12-month old. By 9 months, infants demonstrated a generalized bias toward threat (both fearful and angry facial expressions). Maternal perceived stress was associated with the trajectory of the bias toward angry facial expressions between 6 and 12 months. Specifically, infants of mothers with higher perceived stress exhibited a greater bias toward angry facial expressions at 6 months that decreased across the next 6 months, compared to infants of mothers with lower perceived stress who displayed an increased bias to angry facial expressions over this age range. Maternal depressive symptoms and stressful life events were not associated with trajectories of infant attentional bias to anger or fear. These findings highlight the role of maternal perceptions of stress in shaping developmental trajectories of threat-alerting systems.
对与威胁相关的刺激（如恐惧和愤怒的面部表情）的注意力偏差对于生存至关重要，并且在发展早期就出现了。婴儿在 5-7 个月大时表现出对恐惧面部表情的注意力偏向，在 3 岁时表现出对愤怒的注意力偏向，这些偏向受到经验因素的调节。在一项针对 87 对主要来自低收入家庭的母婴对子的纵向研究中，我们研究了母亲的压力和抑郁症状是否与威胁的注意力偏向轨迹有关，这些轨迹是在婴儿 6、9 和 12 个月大时进行的注意力脱离眼动追踪任务中评估的。到 9 个月大时，婴儿表现出对威胁（包括恐惧和愤怒的面部表情）的普遍偏向。母亲感知到的压力与 6 至 12 个月期间对愤怒面部表情的偏向轨迹有关。具体来说，母亲感知到的压力较高的婴儿在 6 个月时对愤怒的面部表情表现出更大的偏向，而在接下来的 6 个月中，这种偏向会逐渐减少，而母亲感知到的压力较低的婴儿在这个年龄段对愤怒的面部表情表现出更大的偏向。母亲的抑郁症状和生活压力事件与婴儿对愤怒或恐惧的注意力偏向轨迹无关。这些发现强调了母亲对压力的感知在塑造威胁警报系统的发展轨迹中的作用。
