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12-Month-Old Infants Allocate Increased Neural Resources to Stimuli Associated With Negative Adult Emotion

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Leslie J. Carver at University of California, San Diego
Leslie J. Carver
Brenda G. Vaccaro
Brenda G. Vaccaro
Brenda G. Vaccaro
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Abstract

Young infants use caregivers' emotional expressions to guide their behavior in novel, ambiguous situations. This skill, known as social referencing, likely involves at least 3 separate abilities: (a) looking at an adult in an unfamiliar situation, (b) associating that adult's emotion with the novel situation, and (c) regulating their own emotions in response to the adult's emotional display. The authors measured each of these elements individually as well as how they related to each other. The results revealed that 12-month-olds allocated more attention, as indicated by event-related potential measures, to stimuli associated with negative adult emotion than to those associated with positive or neutral emotion. Infants' interaction with their caregiver was affected by adult emotional displays. In addition, how quickly infants referenced an adult predicted both their brain activity in response to pictures of stimuli associated with negative emotion as well as some aspects of their behavior regulation. The results are discussed with respect to their significance for understanding why infants reference and regulate their behavior in response to adult emotion. Suggestions for further research are provided.
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12-Month-Old Infants Allocate Increased Neural Resources to Stimuli
Associated With Negative Adult Emotion
Leslie J. Carver and Brenda G. Vaccaro
University of California, San Diego
Young infants use caregivers’ emotional expressions to guide their behavior in novel, ambiguous
situations. This skill, known as social referencing, likely involves at least 3 separate abilities: (a) looking
at an adult in an unfamiliar situation, (b) associating that adult’s emotion with the novel situation, and
(c) regulating their own emotions in response to the adult’s emotional display. The authors measured each
of these elements individually as well as how they related to each other. The results revealed that
12-month-olds allocated more attention, as indicated by event-related potential measures, to stimuli
associated with negative adult emotion than to those associated with positive or neutral emotion. Infants’
interaction with their caregiver was affected by adult emotional displays. In addition, how quickly infants
referenced an adult predicted both their brain activity in response to pictures of stimuli associated with
negative emotion as well as some aspects of their behavior regulation. The results are discussed with
respect to their significance for understanding why infants reference and regulate their behavior in
response to adult emotion. Suggestions for further research are provided.
Keywords: social referencing, emotion, brain activity
By the 2nd year of life, infants use the emotional expressions of
familiar adults to regulate their behavior in novel situations (Gun-
nar & Stone, 1984), a skill known as social referencing. This
ability to respond to adults’ emotional signals is imperative to the
survival of children. Caregivers’ emotional expressions convey
information about what children may consume, play with, and
approach safely. Social referencing also may be a precursor to
other social–cognitive abilities, particularly the ability to under-
stand that other people possess thoughts, feelings, and attitudes, or
“theory of mind” (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Stone, Baron-Cohen, &
Knight, 1998). Failure to develop these social–cognitive abilities
is a feature of such disorders as autism.
Feinman and colleagues (Feinman, Roberts, Hsieh, Sawyer, &
Swanson, 1992) described three elements that are involved in
social referencing. The first element involves the infant seeking
information from adults in a novel or ambiguous situation. This
usually takes the form of a triadic interaction among the infant,
adult, and object and may be related to infant joint attention. The
second element involves the infant associating the referent with the
social message.The third element involves the infant regulating
his or her behavior in response to the information provided by the
referee (the adult providing the information). Although each of
these three social referencing elements is important in early social
cognition, most studies have focused primarily on infants’ regula-
tion of their behavior in response to the referee’s signal. The
purpose of the present research was to examine these three aspects
of social referencing and how they interact in 12-month-old infants
by examining their behavior in a context designed to elicit social
referencing and their brain activity in response to referents.
Studies of the first element (i.e., joint attention) of social refer-
encing as it relates to social referencing are rare. Some research on
early joint attention has documented relations between joint atten-
tion and general cognitive abilities. For example, imitative play,
referential language, and the ability to follow an adult’s bid for
joint attention emerge at a similar age and are correlated with one
another (Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasello, 1998; Slaughter & Mc-
Connell, 2003). However, we know relatively little about how joint
attention is related to skills involved in social referencing, such as
emotion–referent associations and behavior regulation (Moore &
Corkum, 1994).
Few investigations have been conducted to specifically examine
the second social referencing element: how infants form relations
between emotional signals and novel objects. In one study, Herten-
stein and Campos (2004) examined infants’ behavior directed
toward novel objects after a delay. This study established that
14-month-olds’, but not 11-month-olds’, behavior was influenced
by an adult emotional signal after a delay of 1 hr. However,
although retention of an association between the emotional infor-
mation and the novel object is probably required for infants to be
affected by the emotional information after a delay, this study
measured only the third aspect of social referencing, behavior
regulation. An important question that remains unaddressed is how
infants’ associative abilities are involved in social referencing.
Presumably, development in memory and attention influences how
infants form these associations.
In contrast to the small number of studies of the role of joint
attention and associations between emotions and referents in social
Leslie J. Carver and Brenda G. Vaccaro, Department of Psychology and
Program in Human Development, University of California, San Diego.
This research was funded by Grant 1 R21 HD43739 from the National
Institutes of Health. This research was approved by the University of
California, San Diego, Human Subjects Protection Program and by the
State of California Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Leslie J.
Carver, Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego,
9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0109. E-mail: ljcarver@ucsd.edu
Developmental Psychology Copyright 2007 by the American Psychological Association
2007, Vol. 43, No. 1, 54– 69 0012-1649/07/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0012-1649.43.1.54
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