Early Interaction

1. Early Interaction Daniel Messinger

2. Social play • Enjoyable interaction for its own sake • "mutual maintenance of attention and arousal within” a range that facilitates positive expressions like smiles and coos • (Stern, 1974a, p. 404). • Often occurs during face-to-face interactions in the middle-class West

4. Smile development in Germany and Africa • ‘At 6 weeks, mothers and infants from both communities smiled at each other for similar (albeit very short) amounts of time and imitated each other’s smiling rarely. • At 12 weeks, mothers and their infants from Münster smiled at and imitated each other more often than did Nso mothers and their infants. • Wörmann, V., Holodynski, M., Kärtner, J., & Keller, H. (2012). A cross-cultural comparison of the development of the social smile: A longitudinal study of maternal and infant imitation in 6- and 12-week-old infants. Infant Behavior and Development, 35(3), 335-347. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2012.03.002

5. Early interaction • Mother tends to gaze at infant almost continuously • Through two months, infants are transfixed by caregiver’s face • Infant and caregiver interactions resemble those of romantic lovers in the beginning of the relationship

6. Infant gaze at mother declines – except when mother is smiling Percent of session Why? Inexact depiction of Kaye & Fogel, 1978

7. Infant Smile, Mother Smile psy.miami.edu/faculty/dmessinger/

8. Pattern in middle-class western dyads • Infant gazes at the mother who smiles, makes an exaggerated display, and/or vocalizes. • The infant smiles. The mother smiles or is already smiling. The infant gazes away. • The mother tones things down and waits or tries to get the infant's attention. • Clinical implications

9. Inverse Optimal Control Sensory Feedback and Reward Mathematical framework linking observed behavior during early social interaction with infant and mother reward structure World (mother smiling) Action

10. What do babies want? Implications for autism? Not what moms want….

11. Mother Smile Infant Smile Social-emotional development Smile turn-taking increased with age, mean r= 0.43, p< 0.001 Turn-taking No Turn-taking Mother Smile Mother Smile Infant Smile psy.miami.edu/faculty/dmessinger

12. Face-to-face interaction can be bi-directional • Infants tend to influence parents who sometimes influence infants • Mothers are not simply inserting their actions in the pauses between infant actions • Influencing the probability the partner will engage in a particular action • Not determining that the action will occur. • Developmentally, infants become more likely to reciprocate and to elicit

13. Mutual regulation (=bi-directional) • “both partners reciprocally modify their actions based on feedback they receive from their partners” (Tronick et al., 1978, p. 2). • This is how infants learn “the meaning of their own expressive behavior” (Tronick et al., 1978, p. 1). • video

14. Infant leads parent Chow, Haltigan, & Messinger, 2010, Emotion Face-to-Face Still-Face Reunion

15. Evidence of infant expectations/intentionality • How do we know if infant really is attempting to get interaction back on track? • Cease interaction • See if infant attempts to re-commence interaction

16. Face to Face-Still Face (video) Face to Face (FF) Reunion (RE) Still Face (SF) 2 minutes 3 minutes 3 minutes

17. Idealized still-face description • Infant orients and greets mother • Gazes at mother and smiles • But then looks away • Gazes at mother, even “smiles briefly, yet warily in less and less convinced attempts to get the interaction back on track” (p. 8), • Eventually withdrawing, with body and gaze oriented away, giving up. • Tronick FFSF at 15 shttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGEbZht0 • Reality: Individual differences in expression of positive and negative affect

18. Video: FFSF Face to Face (FF) Still Face (SF) Reunion (RE)

19. The many faces of the Still-Face Paradigm: A review and meta-analysis by Mesman, van IJzendoorn, & Bakermans-Kranenburg

20. SFP Effects

21. Through mutual influence, infants come to understand themselves as social beings who affect and are affected by others Mutual Influence InfantMother InfantMother and MotherInfant Relation to bi-directional influence, synchrony…

22. Face-to-face • The coordination of affective expression during face-to-face interactions facilitates the transition from mutual regulation to self-regulation. • Face-to-face synchrony  infants’ first opportunity • to practice interpersonal coordination of biological rhythms, • to experience the mutual regulation of positive arousal, • to build the lead-lag structure of an adult communication.

23. A close look at interaction psy.miami.edu/faculty/dmessinger/

24. Face-to-face/still-face

25. Mutual Responsive Orientation “a positive, close, mutually binding, and cooperative relationship, which encompasses two components: responsiveness and shared positive affect” Kochanska

26. How does MRO work? • Positive mood yields prosocial behavior • Promotes responsive stance toward parent • And committed compliance • Eagerly working with parent • Potential pathway to internalization

27. Proposed mechanism • Young infants who act with the developing expectation of eliciting positive affect in the parent develop to be young children who regulate themselves to please their parents.

28. Parent-Infant Interaction Infant Smile, Mother Smile psy.miami.edu/faculty/dmessinger

31. Self-regulation • Fogel (1993) described behavior as developing in the individual while simultaneously modifying and being modified by the behavior of a partner. • Self-regulation has previously been studied through specific behaviors like infant gaze aversion (Field 1981) and infant self- touch (Koulomzin et al. 2002). • The current study hopes to show the importance of self-contingency to better understand mother-infant communication.

32. Methods: Modality – specific pairings • 132 4-month old infants (58 female) • 10 minute play session without toys with mothers • Coded behaviors with ordinalized scales from high to low • Used time-series approach to model dyads 1. Infant attention– mother attention 2. Infant facial affect–mother facial affect 3. Infant vocal affect–mother facial affect 4. Infant facial-visual engagement—mother facial-visual engagement 5. Infant facial-visual engagement—mother touch 6. Infant vocal affect–mother touch 7. Infant touch–mother touch 8. Infant head orientation–mother spatial orientation

33. Self-contingency & interactive contingency

34. Evidence for dynamic systems principles • Interactive contingency is organized by a bidirectional, but asymmetrical, process: Maternal contingent coordination with infant is higher than infant contingent coordination with mother. • Self- and interactive contingency processes are not separate; each affects the other in communication modalities of facial affect, facialvisual engagement, and orientation

35. Early caregiving relationships Social, emotional, cognitive, biological outcomes, and… Brain Development? Lucette, 2017

36. Longitudinal study • Infant-mother dyads observed at 5 months, 10 months, 24 months • Is the quality of maternal parenting behavior related to infant brain development? • Outcomes: frontal EEG resting power and increase in frontal EEG resting power Lucette, 2017

37. 352 dyads • Resting EEG recorded for one minute • Mother-infant interaction recorded for 2 minutes • Mothers were instructed to interact with their infants as they normally would at home • Maternal intrusiveness and maternal positive affect Lucette, 2017

38. Results Are maternal behaviors associated with EEG power? • Maternal intrusiveness not associated with EEG power • Maternal positive affect related to EEG frontal power at 10 and 24 months Lucette, 2017

39. Results Is maternal positive affect associated with age-related increases in frontal power? • Hierarchical regressions controlling for prior power Lucette, 2017

40. Lucette, 2017

41. Lucette, 2017