Infants Memory for an Emotional Stimulant

婴儿每天都要面对一系列正常的压力性社会情绪事件（例如，等待照顾者对他们的需求作出反应）。但是他们记得这些压力事件吗？他们能记得多久？这个项目的目的是研究婴儿什么时候开始记忆事件，以及他们能记住多久。本实验研究选择的事件是婴儿和他/她的母亲之间正常的面对面的社会互动的中断，称为静止脸（SF），在这种情况下，母亲看着她的婴儿，但不回应婴儿与她一起玩的尝试。大量研究表明，SF在婴儿中引发了一种特定的反应，其特征是快乐和兴趣的积极情绪减少，愤怒和悲伤的消极情绪增加，目光远离母亲的增加以及应对行为（如吮吸拇指）的增加。婴儿也有神经生理迹象表明，SF受到压力，如心率加快和压力激素皮质醇增加。但婴儿还记得这种面部效应吗？在这项研究中，pi将观察3、4和5个月大的婴儿在两次接触正常的面对面游戏和静止面孔时的情绪、心率和皮质醇反应，并比较他们在第二次接触没有静止面孔经验的婴儿时的反应。第二次暴露将在第一次暴露后1天、1周或1个月发生。因为情境线索有助于记忆我们会让母亲穿着黄色的罩衫当她们和婴儿玩耍和做静止的表情时。我们的预期是，实验条件下的婴儿会表现出对SF记忆的证据，他们看母亲的次数更少，目光移开的时间更短，表现出更多的负面反应，心率和激素反应也比幼稚的婴儿高。第一次和第二次接触的时间间隔越短，这些反应就越强烈，婴儿年龄越大，这些反应就越强烈。婴儿在日常生活中所经历的大部分压力本质上都是社会性的，发现社会事件如何影响婴儿最初几个月的记忆、行为和生理，将填补我们对正常婴儿如何应对和记忆压力事件的理解的重要空白。这项研究的发现将为临床医生和其他人提供一个有用的框架，以了解遭受创伤或父母虐待或忽视的婴儿的记忆和反应性，并对精神病理学的早期发展、干预和政策产生影响。

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.