THE ROLE OF EMOTIONAL CONTAGION ON AFFECTIVE SOCIAL REFERENCING IN MOTHER-INFANT DYADS
JAMIE LEE JIA MIN
JAMIE LEE JIA MIN
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Abstract
The aim of the study was to determine if emotional contagion played a role in affective social referencing in mother-infant dyads. Emotional contagion is the phenomenon in which affect is shared between individuals through imitation of the emotional expressions of a referent via postural feedback. Affective social referencing refers to the use of a referent’s emotional information to inform one’s own appraisal. Other factors that might impact emotional contagion, maternal emotional energy and postpartum depression, were also investigated. 16 mother-infant dyads performed a social learning task. First, infants observed their mother’s positive or negative emotional expressions towards a pair of novel objects. Next, they interacted with the objects during a Still-Face (SF) period. Their behaviours during this period were manually coded. At the participant level, increased emotional contagion was found to predict increased affective social referencing in infants. Out of the three performance indices (first touch bias, looking bias, and touching bias), touching bias produced the strongest correlation with contagion. Emotional contagion between mother and infant was also investigated and opposing directions of imitation were found for positive and negative affect. These findings have theoretical implications for future research and practical implications for healthy socioemotional development in parent-child daily interaction.
Keywords
Social learning, social referencing, emotional contagion, emotional energy, postpartum depression, mother-infant dyad/interaction
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2020-04-19
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