Neuroscience
Watch a nine-month-old baby playing with his mother and it's already apparent that the child is a truly social being. You'll doubtless see him smiling and directing his mother's attention to share what he's interested in. But according to Meaghan Parlade and colleagues, not all babies at this age have equal social skills - subtle differences in their social behaviour can be discerned and are predictive of social and emotional adjustment eighteen months later.
One such behaviour that varies between babies is what the researchers call "anticipatory smiling" - the act of looking at an object, such as a toy, smiling, and then gazing at mum, dad, or some other social partner, with that smile still in place. By way of contrast, a "reactive smile" is where the baby looks at a toy, turns to their mum and smiles only after making eye contact. The "anticipatory smile" is deemed a more advance social skill because it reflects a motivation to engage others using positive emotion.
Parlade's team videoed babies interacting with their care-givers when they were six, eight, ten, twelve and thirty months old. What they found was evidence of a clear developmental trajectory: babies at six months who smiled more at a suddenly unresponsive parent (a test known as the "still face" procedure) also tended to employ more "anticipatory smiles" between the age of eight and twelve months, and in turn, those babies who used more "anticipatory smiles" tended to be more socially competent at thirty months, as judged by such things as their ability to play well with other children and talk about feelings. By contrast, earlier use of "reactive smiles" did not have this association with later social competence.
"These associations suggest a line of continuity between infants' emotional expressivity during early social situations and later adaptive relatedness with others," the researchers said. "Anticipatory smiles may signify an awareness of the separate attentional state and affective availability of the other."
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M PARLADE, D MESSINGER, C DELGADO, M KAISER, A VANHECKE, P MUNDY (2009). Anticipatory smiling: Linking early affective communication and social outcome. Infant Behavior and Development, 32 (1), 33-43 DOI: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2008.09.007
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
What's in a baby's smile?
Watch a nine-month-old baby playing with his mother and it's already apparent that the child is a truly social being. You'll doubtless see him smiling and directing his mother's attention to share what he's interested in. But according to Meaghan Parlade and colleagues, not all babies at this age have equal social skills - subtle differences in their social behaviour can be discerned and are predictive of social and emotional adjustment eighteen months later.One such behaviour that varies between babies is what the researchers call "anticipatory smiling" - the act of looking at an object, such as a toy, smiling, and then gazing at mum, dad, or some other social partner, with that smile still in place. By way of contrast, a "reactive smile" is where the baby looks at a toy, turns to their mum and smiles only after making eye contact. The "anticipatory smile" is deemed a more advance social skill because it reflects a motivation to engage others using positive emotion.
Parlade's team videoed babies interacting with their care-givers when they were six, eight, ten, twelve and thirty months old. What they found was evidence of a clear developmental trajectory: babies at six months who smiled more at a suddenly unresponsive parent (a test known as the "still face" procedure) also tended to employ more "anticipatory smiles" between the age of eight and twelve months, and in turn, those babies who used more "anticipatory smiles" tended to be more socially competent at thirty months, as judged by such things as their ability to play well with other children and talk about feelings. By contrast, earlier use of "reactive smiles" did not have this association with later social competence.
"These associations suggest a line of continuity between infants' emotional expressivity during early social situations and later adaptive relatedness with others," the researchers said. "Anticipatory smiles may signify an awareness of the separate attentional state and affective availability of the other."
_________________________________
M PARLADE, D MESSINGER, C DELGADO, M KAISER, A VANHECKE, P MUNDY (2009). Anticipatory smiling: Linking early affective communication and social outcome. Infant Behavior and Development, 32 (1), 33-43 DOI: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2008.09.007Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Human infants are helpless. At first they can't even support the weight of their own heads. Crawling and walking take months to master. Compare this with the sprightly newborns of other mammals, such as kittens and foals, up and about within an hour...
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Image: Tucia / FlickrCrying is an important survival behaviour for babies - the world is informed that they are in distress and need prompt attention. Many parents also describe what looks like fake crying by their infants. It seems as though the...
- Why, When We're Distressed, Do We Sometimes Smile?
You might have found yourself doing it: smiling when really you're upset or distressed. Why do we do it? It's a question that has divided psychologists. Is it to camouflage our true feelings from others? Or is it because smiling comforts us and...
- Tickle: Not Such A Laughing Matter
The similar way we react to a joke and to being tickled has led some, including Darwin, to suggest that our emotional experience of each is the same: that tickle is a 'physical joke'. Now for the first time, psychologists have studied people’s...
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