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Is infant neural sensitivity to vocal emotion associated with mother-infant relational experience?

Is infant neural sensitivity to vocal emotion associated with mother-infant relational experience?
Is infant neural sensitivity to vocal emotion associated with mother-infant relational experience?

An early understanding of others’ vocal emotions provides infants with a distinct advantage for eliciting appropriate care from caregivers and for navigating their social world. Consistent with this notion, an emerging literature suggests that a temporal cortical response to the prosody of emotional speech is observable in the first year of life. Furthermore, neural specialisation to vocal emotion in infancy may vary according to early experience. Neural sensitivity to emotional non-speech vocalisations was investigated in 29 six-month-old infants using near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Both angry and happy vocalisations evoked increased activation in the temporal cortices (relative to neutral and angry vocalisations respectively), and the strength of the angry minus neutral effect was positively associated with the degree of directiveness in the mothers’ play interactions with their infant. This first fNIRS study of infant vocal emotion processing implicates bilateral temporal mechanisms similar to those found in adults and suggests that infants who experience more directive caregiving or social play may more strongly or preferentially process vocal anger by six months of age.

1932-6203
Zhao, Chen
7fd11181-e641-496d-9d61-a9b6e4fadd28
Chronaki, Georgia
6c486b0a-c073-4cca-8abe-2837c067d89a
Schiessl, Ingo
15b1a9e7-62be-4015-8e59-a5a1e6afa97c
Wan, Ming Wai
875ef73b-e481-4db6-887c-502b9e48a734
Abel, Kathryn M.
98ad72b6-6b11-430b-bfc0-523bc5dc1d61
Zhao, Chen
7fd11181-e641-496d-9d61-a9b6e4fadd28
Chronaki, Georgia
6c486b0a-c073-4cca-8abe-2837c067d89a
Schiessl, Ingo
15b1a9e7-62be-4015-8e59-a5a1e6afa97c
Wan, Ming Wai
875ef73b-e481-4db6-887c-502b9e48a734
Abel, Kathryn M.
98ad72b6-6b11-430b-bfc0-523bc5dc1d61

Zhao, Chen, Chronaki, Georgia, Schiessl, Ingo, Wan, Ming Wai and Abel, Kathryn M. (2019) Is infant neural sensitivity to vocal emotion associated with mother-infant relational experience? PLoS ONE, 14 (2), [e0212205]. (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0212205).

Record type: Article

Abstract

An early understanding of others’ vocal emotions provides infants with a distinct advantage for eliciting appropriate care from caregivers and for navigating their social world. Consistent with this notion, an emerging literature suggests that a temporal cortical response to the prosody of emotional speech is observable in the first year of life. Furthermore, neural specialisation to vocal emotion in infancy may vary according to early experience. Neural sensitivity to emotional non-speech vocalisations was investigated in 29 six-month-old infants using near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Both angry and happy vocalisations evoked increased activation in the temporal cortices (relative to neutral and angry vocalisations respectively), and the strength of the angry minus neutral effect was positively associated with the degree of directiveness in the mothers’ play interactions with their infant. This first fNIRS study of infant vocal emotion processing implicates bilateral temporal mechanisms similar to those found in adults and suggests that infants who experience more directive caregiving or social play may more strongly or preferentially process vocal anger by six months of age.

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Accepted/In Press date: 29 January 2019
e-pub ahead of print date: 27 February 2019

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 429049
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/429049
ISSN: 1932-6203
PURE UUID: b95d8532-32ff-4239-bde8-fd131d1b54d4

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Date deposited: 20 Mar 2019 17:30
Last modified: 05 Jun 2024 17:40

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Contributors

Author: Chen Zhao
Author: Georgia Chronaki
Author: Ingo Schiessl
Author: Ming Wai Wan
Author: Kathryn M. Abel

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