Here's looking at you, kid: relationships between mothers’ visual scanning, parental reflective functioning, emotional availability and child development
posted on 2025-05-11, 16:56authored byChristy Jones
Abstract: The ability to detect and respond to infant facial affective cues is crucial in the way early parent-infant relationships develop. A small amount of research has linked infant cue processing with the quality of the mother-infant relationship (Pearson, Lightman, & Evans, 2011) and a mother’s capacity to reflect on her child’s emotions, feelings and behaviours (Rutherford, Maupin, Landi, Potenza, & Mayes, 2017). A series of studies sought to integrate the assessment of clinically relevant parenting capacities, namely, parental reflective functioning and emotional availability, with an objective psychophysiological measure of a mother’s visual processing of their infant’s affective cues. The findings reveal that mothers’ reflective functioning and emotional availability predicted patterns of visual scanning to their own infant’s face, even when differential visual processing of ‘own’ verses ‘unknown’ (control) infant faces was not observed. Understanding the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying infant cue processing is important for supporting healthy parent-infant relationships and child wellbeing, in so far as attending to infant cues is implicated not only in parental behaviours but in parental reflective capacities about their child’s emotions and behaviours.
History
Year awarded
2020.0
Thesis category
Doctoral Degree
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Supervisors
Campbell, Linda (University of Newcastle); Loughland , Carmel (University of Newcastle)