Infants Memory for an Emotional Stimulant

每天，婴儿都会面对一系列正常的压力性社会情绪事件（例如，等待他们的照顾者回应他们的需求）。但是他们记得这些压力事件吗？他们记得这些事件多久？ 这个项目的目标是检查幼儿何时开始记住事件以及他们能记住多久。 本实验选择的事件是婴儿和他/她的母亲之间的正常面对面的社会互动被破坏，称为静止脸（SF），其中母亲看着她的婴儿，但不回应她的婴儿试图与她玩耍。大量的研究表明，SF激发婴儿的特定反应，其特征在于快乐和兴趣的积极情绪减少和愤怒和悲伤的消极情绪增加，远离母亲的目光增加和应对行为增加（例如，拇指吸吮）。 婴儿也会出现SF应激的神经生理学迹象，如心率加快和应激激素皮质醇增加。 但是，这种面部效应仍然是婴儿记得的吗？在这项研究中，PI将观察3、4和5个月大的婴儿对两次正常面对面游戏和静止面孔的情绪、心率和皮质醇反应，并将他们在第二次暴露时的反应与之前没有静止面孔经验的婴儿进行比较。 第二次暴露将在首次暴露后1天、1周或1个月进行。 因为情境线索有助于记忆，我们会让母亲在和婴儿玩耍和做静止表情时穿黄色的工作服。 我们的期望是，在实验条件下的婴儿将通过较少地看着母亲而更快地将目光移开来表现出SF记忆的证据，并且表现出比幼稚婴儿更多的负面反应、更高的心率和激素反应性。 第一次和第二次接触之间的时间间隔越短，这些反应越强烈，婴儿年龄越大，他们在日常生活中经历的压力在本质上是社会性的，找出社会事件如何影响记忆，行为和生理在生命的第一个月将填补我们理解正常婴儿如何科普和记住压力事件的重要空白。 这项研究的结果将为临床医生和其他人提供一个有用的框架，以了解暴露于创伤或父母虐待或忽视的婴儿的记忆和反应，并对精神病理学，干预和政策的早期发展产生影响。

Each day, infants confront a range of normal stressful social emotional events (e.g., waiting for their caregiver to respond to their needs). But do they remember these stressful events and for how long do they remember them? The goal of this project is to examine when young infants begin to remember events and for how long they can remember them. The event chosen for this experimental study is the a disruption of normal face to face social interaction between an infant and his/her mother called the still-face (SF) in which the mother looks her infant but does not respond to her infant's attempts to play with her. A wealth of studies has shown that the SF elicits a specific reaction in infants, characterized by a decrease in positive emotions of joy and interest and an increase in negative emotions of anger and sadness engagement, an increase in looking away from the mother and an increase in coping behaviors (e.g., thumb-sucking). Infants also evidence neurophysiologic signs of stress to the SF, such as an increase in heart rate and an increase in the stress hormone cortisol. But is this still face effect something that the infants remember? In this study the PIs will observe the emotional, heart rate and cortisol reactions of 3, 4 and 5 month old infants to two exposures to normal face-to-face play and the still-face and compare their reactions at the second exposure to infants who had no prior experience with the still-face. The second exposure will occur at 1 day, 1 week or 1 month after the first exposure. Because contextual cues aid memory we will have the mothers wear a yellow smock when they are playing and doing the still-face with their infants. Our expectation is that infants in the experimental condition will exhibit evidence for memory for the SF by looking less at the mother, and by looking away sooner, and show more negative reactions and higher heart rates and hormonal reactivity than naive infants. These reactions will be stronger the short the interval between the first and second exposure and they will be stronger the older the infant.Much of the stress infants experience in their daily lives is social in nature, and finding out how a social event affects memory, behavior, and physiology over the first months life will fill an important gap in our understanding of how normal infant cope with and remember a stressful events. The findings from this study will provide a useful framework for clinicians and others for understanding memory and reactivity in infants exposed to trauma, or parental abuse or neglect, with implications for the early development of psychopathology, intervention, and policy.