Maternal nurturing experience affects the perception and recognition of adult and infant facial expressions

Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2018-10-23

The perception and recognition of facial expressions are crucial for parenting. This study investigated whether and how maternal nurturing experience and trait anxiety influence the perception and recognition of infant and adult facial expressions. This was assessed by comparing the performance of primiparous mothers (n = 25) and non-mothers (n = 28) on an emotional face perception task. Trait anxiety was measured using the Japanese version of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). We found that mothers had higher recognition accuracy for facial expressions, but only of adults, not infants. Moreover, as trait anxiety increased, so did mothers’ sensitivity in perceiving facial expressions of both infants and adults. These findings suggest that maternal nurturing experience does enhance the recognition of adult emotional expressions, and an optimal level of maternal trait anxiety may enhance mothers’ sensitivity toward infants’ and adults’ emotional signals.

Open access content. Open access content
© 2018 Matsunaga et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

English

YJ@ oai:repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp:2433/234788
1932-6203
PLOS ONE
13
10
e0205738
30352063
1088303315

KYOTO UNIV
From OAIster®, provided by the OCLC Cooperative.

edsoai.on1088303315