High quality social environment buffers infants' cognitive development from poor maternal mental health: Evidence from a study in Bhutan.

Poor maternal mental health negatively impacts cognitive development from infancy to childhood, affecting both behavior and brain architecture. In a non-western context (Thimphu, Bhutan), we demonstrate that culturally-moderated factors such as family, community social support, and enrichment may buffer and scaffold the development of infant cognition when maternal mental health is poor. We used eye-tracking to measure early building blocks of cognition: attention regulation and social perception, in 9-month-old Bhutanese infants (N = 121). The cognitive development of Bhutanese infants in richer social environments was buffered from poor maternal mental health, while for infants in environments with lower rates of protective social environment factors, worse maternal mental health significantly predicted greater costs for infant attention, a fundamental building block cognition. International policies and interventions geared to improve maternal mental health and child health outcomes should incorporate each regions' unique family, cultural, and community support structures.

Infants' Selective Visual Attention Is Dependent on Maternal Affect and Emotional Context.

Development of selective attention during the first year of life is critical to cognitive and socio-emotional skills. It is also a period that the average child's interactions with their mother dominate their social environment. This study examined how maternal negative affect and an emotion face prime (mother/stranger) jointly effect selective visual attention. Results from linear mixed-effects modeling showed that 9-month olds (N=70) were faster to find a visual search target after viewing a fearful face (regardless of familiarity) or their mother's angry face. For mothers with high negative affect, infants' attention was further impacted by fearful faces, resulting in faster search times. Face emotion interacted with mother's negative affect, demonstrating a capacity to influence what infants attend in their environment.

Emotional distractors and attentional control in anxious youth: eye tracking and fMRI data.

Attentional control theory suggests that high cognitive demands impair the flexible deployment of attention control in anxious adults, particularly when paired with external threats. Extending this work to pediatric anxiety, we report two studies utilising eye tracking (Study 1) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (Study 2). Both studies use a visual search paradigm to examine anxiety-related differences in the impact of threat on attentional control at varying levels of task difficulty. In Study 1, youth ages 8-18 years (N = 109), completed the paradigm during eye tracking. Results indicated that youth with more severe anxiety took longer to fixate on and identify the target, specifically on difficult trials, compared to youth with less anxiety. However, no anxiety-related effects of emotional distraction (faces) emerged. In Study 2, a separate cohort of 8-18-year-olds (N = 72) completed a similar paradigm during fMRI. Behaviourally, youth with more severe anxiety were slower to respond on searches following non-threatening, compared to threatening, distractors, but this effect did not vary by task difficulty. The same interaction emerged in the neuroimaging analysis in the superior parietal lobule and precentral gyrus-more severe anxiety was associated with greater brain response following non-threatening distractors. Theoretical implications of these inconsistent findings are discussed.

The effects of emotion priming on visual search in socially anxious adults.

This study examined the effects of emotion priming on visual search in participants characterised for different levels of social anxiety. Participants were primed with five facial emotions (angry, fear, happy, neutral, and surprised) and one scrambled face immediately prior to visual search trials involving finding a slanted coloured line amongst distractors, as reaction times and accuracy to target detection were recorded. Results suggest that for individuals low in social anxiety, being primed with an angry, surprised, or fearful face facilitated visual search compared to being primed with scrambled, neutral or happy faces. However, these same emotions degraded visual search in participants with high levels of social anxiety. This study expands on previous research on the impact of emotion on attention, finding that amongst socially anxious individuals, the effects of priming with threat extend beyond initial attention capture or disengagement, degrading later visual search.

The relation between reactivity at 4 months and Behavioral Inhibition in the second year: Replication Across Three Independent Samples.

This paper examines the predictive relations between two infant temperamental biases assessed at 4 months and inhibited behavior during the first two years of life in three independent samples from two research laboratories. Although each sample used slightly different criteria for classifying infants, the results across samples were consistent. Infants of both genders who displayed high levels of motor activity and distress to unfamiliar events were more inhibited at 14 months of age. By 24 months there were significant sex differences: boys identified as high reactive were more inhibited than high reactive girls.