Mothers who recognize the happiness of others respond more sensitively to their children in the first months of life

Opening his eyes, the child reaches for the toy. Her caregiver, sensing her interest, takes the toy into her hands.

“Huh!” – exclaims the child, and she educator replies: “Yes!”

If the child fusses, the caregiver rubs its back until it calms down. A child smiles and its caregiver smiles back, in a moment that psychologist Mary Ainsworth called “mutual admiration.”

It is the dance of the infant and the responsive caregiver. These “submit and return“Interaction is critical to infant development. But becoming a responsive dance partner can be challenging for caregivers, and researchers are trying to identify the skills that help this interaction flourish.

At st University of Virginia BabyLabmy colleagues and I will investigate early experiences and brain processes that lay the foundation for infants’ emerging social abilities, including experiences with caregivers.

In a new study published in the journal Emotionswe followed 120 mother and babies within the first five months after birth. We found that being emotionally receptive or able to identify the emotional state of others by theirs facial expressionis a key predictor of responsive caregiving—give and return behaviors that make a dance partner responsive.

In the first weeks after birth, we showed mothers a series of unfamiliar adult faces that changed from a neutral expression to one of six emotions: happiness, fear, sadness, anger, disgust, or another neutral face. Their task was to identify which emotion they were seeing and do it as quickly as possible. This is not an easy task, and when we calculated how accurate the mothers were, we saw a wide range of performance, suggesting that some had a harder time recognizing certain emotions.

A few months later, we invited the same mothers and their 5-month-olds into the playroom and asked them to simply “play with your baby like you normally would” for five minutes. From the video recordings of their interactions, we were able to observe how each caregiver responded to their child’s cues.

For many, the interaction was as smooth as a good conversation. Even when these infants cried or acted “difficult,” their mother’s coordinated response quickly helped the infants calm down and return to important play. For others, interaction was a struggle. Some mothers tried to control or interrupt their children’s play until the child calmed down and shut down, while others ignored their children’s pleas for comfort and connection.

When we looked at mothers’ performance on an emotion perception task alongside their behavior toward their infants, we found that mothers’ ability to specifically recognize happiness—but not other emotions such as fear or sadness—predicted how sensitive and empathetic they were when interacting with her baby in four months.

It’s not that sensitive mothers expressed more joy toward their children—they weren’t more “smiling” than average. Rather, they were exceptionally good at perceiving the positive emotions of others. It is possible that the ability to recognize happiness in others usually allows mothers to better sense their children’s happiness concretely and respond accordingly. Therefore, emotion perception skills may be an important latent force that supports sensitive care in the first months of a child’s life.

What is particularly interesting is that sensitive mothers experienced more positive emotions as measured by images of adult strangers. We can only speculate that mothers’ perceptual abilities may translate into recognizing their children’s emotions, which may help them respond sensitively to their children’s emotional cues.

More questions to study

Our study included only US-resident mothers. We only observed them during one brief play with the babies. It remains to be seen whether our results would be similar or different for parents, in other cultures, or in more stressful settings. For example, it is possible that recognition negative emotions— like fear or sadness — is more important to caregivers’ reactions when their children are upset or stressed. We hope to explore these possibilities in the future.

Sensitive and compassionate interaction with caregivers is critical to creating baby brains and forecasting later social skills and even physical health. The findings provide support for programs that develop caregivers’ emotional skills, including the ability to recognize the joy of others. Understanding the emotional intelligence skills that support sensitive caregiving can help in the early stages of intervention to develop healthy and safe parent-child relationships.

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