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Transmission of social anxiety from mother to infant: An experimental study using a social referencing paradigm
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Behaviour Research and Therapy 44 (2006) 1165–1175 www.elsevier.com/locate/brat
Transmission of social anxiety from mother to infant: An experimental study using a social referencing paradigm Marc de Rosnay, Peter J. Cooper, Nicolas Tsigaras, Lynne Murray Winnicott Research Unit, School of Psychology, University of Reading, Earley Gate, Whiteknights Road, Reading RG6 6AL, UK Received 22 December 2004; received in revised form 29 July 2005; accepted 6 September 2005
Abstract In this experiment we investigated the impact of indirect expressions of maternal social anxiety on infant interactions with a stranger. A social referencing paradigm was used in which infants first observed their mothers interacting with a stranger and then interacted with the stranger themselves. Mothers made no direct communicative gestures to the infant concerning the stranger throughout the procedure. There were two experimental conditions experienced by all mother–infant pairs (N ¼ 24; 12 boys)—non-anxious and socially anxious—and there were two male strangers. Infants were between 12 and 14 months (M ¼ 12:8, SD ¼ :76). Order of condition and stranger presentation were counterbalanced. Before testing, mothers, none of whom were significantly socially anxious, were trained to behave in a nonanxious and a socially anxious manner on the basis of clinical and empirical descriptions of social phobia. The results showed that, compared to their responses following their mothers interacting normally with a stranger, following a socially anxious mother–stranger interaction, infants were significantly more fearful and avoidant with the stranger. Infantstranger avoidance was further modified by infant temperament; high fear infants were more avoidant in the socially anxious condition than low-fear infants. We discuss these findings in light of the possible mechanisms underpinning infant affective and behavioral responsiveness. r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Anxiety; Etiology; Modeling; Social cognition; Social referencing; Infants
Introduction Current accounts of childhood shyness and social anxiety stress that such behavioral disturbances most likely arise from a combination of constitutional vulnerability and certain environmental factors (Crozier & Alden, 2001; Rapee, 1995; Wood, McLeod, Sigman, Hwang, & Chu, 2003). The contribution of genetic factors to shyness and social phobia appears, in fact, to be modest, and the shared environment and, in particular, parenting is likely to play an important role (Eley, 2001; Kendler, Neale, Kessler, & Heath et al., 1992). To date, parenting variables, such as over-control, over-protection, and a lack of encouragement and acceptance, have been emphasized, all of which concern the parents’ direct management of their child Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 118 378 6667; fax: +44 118 378 6665.
E-mail address: [email protected] (M. de Rosnay). 0005-7967/$ - see front matter r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.brat.2005.09.003
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(Burgess, Rubin, Chea, & Nelson, 2001; Rapee, 1997; Schmidt, Polak, & Spooner, 2001; Wood et al., 2003). However, it is also possible that young children acquire a socially fearful disposition vicariously, through their observations of anxious caregiver responses to social encounters; that is, through a modeling process (Bandura, 1977). Evidence for such a process in the context of the development of social anxiety has so far been limited, and has principally been based on questionnaire reports. Thus, Muris and colleagues showed that higher levels of ‘expressed’ anxiety in parents are linked to higher levels of reported childhood fears and worries (Gruener, Muris, & Merckelbach, 1999; Muris, Steerneman, Merckelbach, & Meesters, 1996). Understanding the precise nature of this link on the basis of questionnaire data is, however, problematic: the parental behaviors leading to such childhood outcomes are not objectively established; it is not possible to know whether specific parental behaviors or general parental styles are implicated; and it is unclear in which contexts the transmission of anxiety from parent to child is most likely to occur (Wood et al., 2003). Clearer evidence for the transmission of fear through modeling is available in relation to non-social stimuli, such as the acquisition of specific fears in primates (Cook & Mineka, 1989). With regard to human populations, Gerull and Rapee (2002) found that enactment by mothers of either fearful/disgusted or else happy/encouraging emotional responses to two potentially fear-provoking toys influenced the behavior of their 15–20 month old toddlers: avoidant and fearful child responses were shown to the toy which had been associated with the fearful/disgusted emotional maternal enactment. This finding is important because it provides a clear demonstration of the modeling of fear in young children. The findings of Gerull and Rapee (2002) are consistent with those of a broader literature concerning infants’ capacity to use social information to inform their behaviors. Between 9 and 12 months of age infants become increasingly aware of the agency of other individuals with respect to referents (i.e., objects, persons and events; Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasello, 1998), and they modify their responses to the referent on the basis of another person’s emotional response to it, a process known as social referencing (Feinman, Roberts, Hsieh, Sawyer, & Swanson, 1992). In considering the transmission of anxiety, it is notable within the social referencing literature that negative emotional messages relating to objects (i.e., fear and disgust) appear to have a stronger impact on infant behavioral responses than positive ones (Hornik, Risenhoover, & Gunnar, 1987; Moses, Baldwin, Rosicky, & Tidball, 2001), and that infants are particularly likely to use others’ responses to guide their own behavior when they encounter ambiguity or experience feelings of uncertainty toward the object (Gunnar & Stone, 1984; Sorce, Emde, Campos, & Klinnert, 1985). With respect to social referencing processes concerning persons, there is a smaller literature that has focused on maternal modeling of positive responses. Feiring, Lewis, and Starr (1984) and Feinman and Lewis (1983) both showed that infants were more likely to interact with a stranger in a positive (or less negative) manner when their mother had given positive emotional messages about the stranger. Feiring et al. showed that infants were sensitive to a positive message about a target stranger delivered by a second stranger, although the effects on infant behavior were less pronounced. Murray and colleagues (Murray, Cooper, de Rosnay, Pearson, & Sack, 2005) have argued that the process of social referencing, whereby infants use their mother’s responses to inform their own emotional responses and behavior, may be particularly important in relation to the development of social anxiety, since the development of social referencing coincides with the onset of ‘stranger fear’ (Sroufe, 1977). Thus, they proposed that it is the combination of the infant’s sensitivity to parental emotional responses, and in particular to the expression of negative emotion, coupled with the infant’s own natural apprehensiveness in relation to unfamiliar persons, which constitutes the setting conditions for the early transmission of social anxiety from parent to child. They further speculated that infants of mothers with social phobia, who are repeatedly exposed to signs of maternal anxiety in the context of encounters with unfamiliar people, may, via a social referencing process, adopt these distinctive patterns of interpersonal responsiveness themselves (Murray et al., 2005). Murray and colleagues used a social referencing paradigm to examine the development of socially anxious responses to strangers in a large-scale prospective longitudinal study of a community sample of mothers with social phobia and their infants, together with non-anxious control mother–infant pairs. In this study, the infant initially observed his or her mother interacting with a female stranger (i.e., a vicarious, modeling condition); and in a second episode, the stranger approached the infant and interacted with him or her, during which time the mother could engage with the infant (as well as demonstrate her own emotional response to the stranger). When the infants were 10 months of age, mothers with social phobia displayed more
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signs of anxiety than control mothers in both episodes. In addition, in the second episode, they showed less encouragement of the infant’s engagement with the stranger. When re-tested in the same paradigm at 14 months, the infants of mothers with social phobia had become significantly more avoidant of the stranger over the 4-month period than infants of control mothers, and this effect was intensified in the presence of high levels of manifest maternal anxiety, particularly during the second episode. Although the methodology of the study by Murray and colleagues described above has considerable strengths, the fact that it involved semi-naturalistic observations, in which a number of elements of the mothers’ behavior were related to each other, raises questions about the precise manner in which infant behavior was affected. The fact that maternal anxiety displayed in episode 2, when the infant interacted with the stranger, had a greater impact on infant responsiveness than maternal anxiety displayed in episode 1, when the infant simply observed the mother–stranger interaction, raises the possibility that the infant’s response to the stranger was under relatively direct maternal control. This, in turn, raises the question of whether simple observation of maternal anxiety alone can significantly influence the occurrence of anxious infant responses in a social interaction. The current study was designed to complement that of Murray and colleagues (2005) and addresses the specific question of whether infant social responsiveness is influenced by indirect maternal messages concerning a stranger conveyed via infant observations of mother–stranger interactions. Specifically, we hypothesized that when infants (of non-anxious mothers) saw their mothers behaving in a socially anxious manner towards a stranger they would subsequently modify their own reactions to that stranger. In keeping with the findings of Murray and colleagues, and those of others (e.g., Gerull & Rapee, 2002), we predicted that, compared to observation of non-anxious maternal behavior, observation of socially anxious maternal behavior would cause infants to become more wary (fearful and avoidant) and exhibit fewer emotionally positive behaviors. In order to draw a firm conclusion about infant sensitivity to maternal responding, we used a repeated measures design in which it was possible to evaluate the reactions of the same infant under both socially anxious and non-anxious conditions. Because of the importance placed on infant temperament in the development of social anxiety (Kagan, 1999), we also included a measure of infant temperamental fearfulness (Rothbart, 1978, 1981). Given that stranger approach is inherently fear-provoking for 1-year-olds (Sroufe, 1977), we expected that high-fear infants would show more wariness to the stranger than low-fear infants in both non-anxious and anxious experimental conditions. Since there is some recent evidence that girls may be more sensitive to expressions of maternal affect, and modify their behavior more strongly when their mothers express fear towards a referent (Blackford & Walden, 1998; Gerull & Rapee, 2002), we considered whether boys and girls responded differently in the experimental situation. Method Participants The participants were 12 boys and 12 girls, between 12 and 14 months of age (M ¼ 12.8; SD ¼ :76), and their mothers. Mother–infant pairs were recruited from the Reading area, UK, through National Health Service Health Visitors. The sample represents a randomly selected sub-group, derived from a large consecutive series, of mothers scoring in the low range for social anxiety (see Murray et al., 2005). All mothers were White English speakers. Procedure Participants were assessed at the Winnicott Research Unit, University of Reading. Mothers were invited to attend the Unit and take part in a study about infant shyness. They were told that they would participate in the study as a confederate, and they were also sent a copy of the Infant Behavioral Questionnaire (Rothbart, 1978, 1981). The experiment was run in two phases: training and testing. In the training phase the overall experimental procedure was explained to the mother: On each of two occasions a different male stranger would enter the
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room and engage her in conversation; however, on each occasion she was to behave in a different way; on one occasion she was to respond as she would in an everyday interaction with someone whom she does not know but towards whom she holds no negative feelings (non-anxious condition), and on the other occasion she was to pretend that she felt ‘nervous’ and a little bit ‘fearful’ about interacting with the stranger (socially anxious condition). Everyday situations were used to illustrate these two dispositions. Two short videos, showing a woman in each condition, were used for training and illustration. Each video was shown twice. On the first screening, the video was viewed without sound and attention was given to specific behaviors. On the second screening, attention was given to qualitative aspects of conversation. During both screenings the researcher paused the video and highlighted important features. Mothers were then asked to rehearse the non-anxious and anxious responses along with the researcher. Mothers were also trained not to look at their infant during the two experimental conditions. However, they were asked to interact with their infant in a normal manner between conditions. In the testing phase the mother and infant sat 3.0 m apart; each was positioned approximately 3.5 m away from the doorway. The infant was strapped into a highchair. Immediately to the infant’s left was an empty chair for the stranger. Some magazines were placed next to the mother’s chair. The experimental phase comprised two episodes. In the first, the stranger knocked and entered the room, staying near the doorway. The stranger greeted the mother and engaged her in conversation for 90 s concerning the activities and experiences of the infant and the family. During this time, the stranger stood facing the mother and did not attend to the infant. In the second episode, the stranger first told the mother that he was going to talk to the infant and asked the mother to pick up a magazine and disregard the infant. Having instructed the mother, the stranger greeted the infant, and then made a graded approach, increasing his engagement with the infant, including offering the infant a small toy, and ended by stretching out his arms in a position to pick the infant up, before leaving the room. The stranger’s interaction with the infant lasted approximately 60 s. Before the entry of the second stranger, the mother was given time to make sure her infant was settled. Typically, no maternal intervention was needed. The second stranger then entered and the two episodes were repeated. Mothers were told immediately before the testing phase began which condition they should enact first. Strangers were blind to the condition at entry. The experiment was filmed using three cameras; one camera gave a full-face image of the infant, with the stranger. The other two cameras provided a split screen image showing mother and infant. Experimental conditions and design All infants experienced two conditions: mother interacting in a non-anxious manner with a stranger, and mother interacting in a socially anxious manner with a stranger. Order of condition was counter-balanced, as was the order of stranger presentation (resulting in four combinations). Equal numbers of boys and girls experienced each combination. Materials and measures Maternal training material Two videos were compiled of a woman role-playing both a non-anxious and a socially anxious interaction with a stranger, following the procedure outlined for the first phase of the experiment. The behaviors in the socially anxious video were based on clinical descriptions of social phobia (Clark & Wells, 1995; McNeil, Ries, & Turk, 1995), and observations of maternal social anxiety in a social referencing paradigm (see Murray et al., 2005). These included poor eye contact, stiff posture, wringing hands, touching face, and facial indications of anxiety (e.g., lip biting). Conversational dimensions included limited responses to questions. The behaviors in the non-anxious video were good eye contact, relaxed posture, and an open, friendly expression. Conversational dimensions included full answers to questions (without excessive elaboration), and a conversational tone that encouraged further dialogue. To verify the validity of maternal training, a research assistant, blind to the study hypotheses, rated maternal anxiety in episode 1 for the whole sample on a five-point scale (1: no anxiety–5: pervasive social anxiety; adapted from Murray et al., 2005). Mothers’ mean anxiety scores in the non-anxious and in the
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socially anxious conditions were 1.8 (SD ¼ :78) and 4.1 (SD ¼ :68), respectively. A paired-samples t-test revealed that this difference was highly significant, tð23Þ ¼ 15:01, po:01. Crucially, all mothers were rated as more anxious in the socially anxious condition than in the non-anxious condition. Strangers Both strangers were males in their mid-20s of approximately equal height and coloring. Before the study began, the strangers were fully trained in the procedure. With respect to the infant, strangers were taught to make a graded approach and converse in a reliable manner. With respect to the mother, strangers memorized a scripted set of questions so that they could converse in a reliable and relaxed manner. Infant temperament Temperament was assessed using the Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ; Rothbart, 1978, 1981). The IBQ assesses six temperamental dimensions: activity level, smiling and laughter, fear, distress to limitations, soothability, and orienting. For the purpose of the current study, the fear dimension was of primary interest. This is defined as the child’s distress and/or extended latency to approach an intense or novel stimulus (Rothbart, 1981). It has been shown to have reasonably good temporal stability and convergent validity between 3 and 9 months (Rothbart, 1986). Infants were divided into low and high temperamental fear groups using a median split. The mean temperamental fear score was 2.6 (SD ¼ :66), ranging from 1.2 to 4.1. The mean scores for the low and high groups were 2.2 (SD ¼ :48) and 3.1 (SD ¼ :45), respectively. Internal reliability for the fear scale (13 items) was good (Cronbach a ¼ :70). Infant behavior during the experiment In episode 1, infant looks in the direction of the mother’s face were counted for the first minute to ensure that the infant did indeed observe the mother in each experimental condition. In episode 2, when the infant was as interacting with the stranger, total infant looks in the direction of the mother’s face were counted. Three dimensions of infant affect were also assessed in episode 2: fearfulness, avoidance and positive emotional tone. Fearfulness covered a broad range of behaviors variously defined as fearfulness or wariness (Goldsmith & Rothbart, 1999; Schaffer, Greenwood, & Parry, 1972; Sroufe, 1977; Stevenson-Hinde & Shouldice, 1990). It included a fearful or wary expression, a cry face, fretting, crying, sudden stilling of activity, tense or frozen posture. Avoidance covered infant attempts to increase distance from or avoid contact with the stranger; this included leaning or pulling away, turning or looking away, averting gaze or avoiding eye contact, pushing the stranger away, and placing an arm between the self and the stranger. Positive emotional tone covered all positive aspects of the infant’s mood, and included smiling, positive vocalizations, communicative gestures (e.g., showing), laughter, and joyous excitation (e.g., waving legs and arms in an excited and happy manner). Scoring All videos were scored by the first author, who was blind to the experimental conditions. Videos showing only the infant were scored, and episode 2 of both conditions was always scored before episode 1 so that there could be no cues about which condition the infant was experiencing. Infant looks to the mother’s face in episodes 1 and 2 were straightforward counts. Looks to the mother’s face in episode 2 were counted over the total period during which infant affect was assessed (see below). Infant affect dimensions were assessed in episode 2 during the stranger’s graded approach and interaction with the infant, which was divided into five phases of approximately 10–12 s for the purposes of scoring: (1) calls infant’s name, approaches, and seats himself next to the infant; (2) talks to the infant; (3) shows the infant a toy; (4) reaches out and lightly touches infant’s leg while continuing to talk with the infant; (5) stands up and stretches out his arms, as if to lift the infant. Each affect dimension was rated on a five-point scale (1 absent—5 very frequent) for each of the five phases. A second trained researcher, who was blind to the hypotheses of the experiment, scored videos from four subjects, chosen at random from the sample (i.e., eight clips; 16.7% of the sample). The inter-rater Pearson correlation coefficient for infant looks to mother’s face indicated consistency for this measure (rð8Þ ¼ :97;
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po:001). For infant affect, percentage agreement and weighted-k’s were, respectively, as follows: 79% and .85 for avoidance, 75% and .83 for fearfulness, 85% and .85 for positive emotional tone. Results For infant affect in each of the three dimensions, distributions of total scores approximated normality and the mean score across phases was calculated. Before proceeding with the main analyses, we checked infant responses to the two strangers. There were no significant differences, and stranger effects were therefore not considered further. Because of the small sample size, we first examined whether there was a relationship between gender and temperamental fear. Girls were not significantly more likely to be in the high fear group than boys, w2 ð1; N ¼ 24Þ ¼ :67, ns. Thus, for each infant behavior, we compared the non-anxious and socially anxious conditions, first examining whether order of condition presentation influenced infant responding, and then accounting for the possible influences of gender and temperamental fear. An a-level of .05 was used for all statistical tests except analyses of simple effects, where an a of .01 was employed. Infant looking In episode 1, during the stranger–mother conversation, all infants looked in the direction of their mother’s face at least twice. In the non-anxious condition, the mean number of looks was 4.8 (SD ¼ 1:91), range 2–10. In the socially anxious condition, the mean number of looks to mother was 4.7 (SD ¼ 1:52), range 2–8. We first examined whether infant looking to mother was influenced by order of condition presentation. An ANOVA was conducted with condition as a within-subjects factor and order as a between-subjects factor. There was no interaction between condition and order, and there was also no main effect for condition (F(1,22) ¼ 0.04, ns) or order (F(1,22) ¼ 0, ns). To determine whether infant looking was influenced by infant gender or temperamental fear, a second ANOVA was conducted with condition as a within-subjects factor and gender and temperamental fearfulness as between-subjects factors. All two-way interactions were considered. There were no significant two-way interactions, and there was no main effect for condition (F(1,21) ¼ 0.04, ns), gender (F(1,21) ¼ 0.38, ns), or temperamental fear (F(1,21) ¼ 0.38, ns). In episode 2, during the stranger–infant interaction, not all infants looked in the direction of their mother’s face. In the non-anxious condition, the mean number of looks was 0.9 (SD ¼ 0:90), range 0–3. In the socially anxious condition, the mean number of looks to mother was 1.8 (SD ¼ 1:15), range 0–4. We first examined whether infant looking to mother was influenced by order of condition presentation. An ANOVA was conducted with condition as a within-subjects factor and order as a between-subjects factor. There was no interaction between condition and order (F(1,22) ¼ 0.50, ns). However, there was a significant main effect for condition (F(1,22) ¼ 8.87, po:01), with infants looking more often in the direction of their mothers’ face in the socially anxious condition; and there was a significant main effect of order (F(1,22) ¼ 4.88, po:05), with infants who experienced the non-anxious condition first looking in the direction of their mothers’ face more often over both conditions (M ¼ 3:3, SD ¼ 1:29) than infants who experienced the socially anxious condition first (M ¼ 2:0, SD ¼ 1:48). To determine whether infant looking was influenced by infant gender or temperamental fear, a second ANOVA was conducted with condition as a within-subjects factor and gender and temperamental fearfulness as between-subjects factors. All two-way interactions were considered. No significant interactions were identified. Once again, there was a significant main effect for condition (F(1,21) ¼ 8.61; po:01), but there was no effect for gender (F(1,21) ¼ 0.09, ns), or temperamental fear (F(1,21) ¼ 0.94, ns). Infant affect The mean affect scores in the non-anxious and in the socially anxious conditions during episode 2 were 2.6 (SD ¼ :80) and 3.0 (SD ¼ :71), respectively for fearfulness, 2.4 (SD ¼ :61) and 3.1 (SD ¼ :74) for avoidance, and 1.5 (SD ¼ :46) and 1.3 (SD ¼ :44) for positive emotional tone. For each affect dimension, we first explored the possibility that order of presentation influenced infant affect. ANOVAS were conducted for each
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Table 1 Mean avoidance scores (and standard deviations) for high and low fear infants in episode 2 (N ¼ 24) Condition
Non-anxious Socially anxious
Testing episode Low fear (n ¼ 12)
High fear (n ¼ 12)
2.32 (.51) 2.65 (.54)
2.43 (.71) 3.48 (.68)
affect, with condition as a within-subjects factor and order as a between subjects factor. There was no indication that order of condition presentation influenced infant affect. Infant fearfulness An ANOVA was conducted with condition as a within-subjects factor, and gender and temperamental fear as between-subjects factors. All 2-way interactions were considered. There were no significant interactions. Neither gender (F(1,21) ¼ 3.57, ns), nor temperamental fear (F(1,21) ¼ .59, ns), had a significant influence on infant fearfulness. Infants were, however, significantly more fearful in the socially anxious condition than the non-anxious condition. (F(1,21) ¼ 7.93, po:05). The effect size of this difference was medium (d ¼ :58). Avoidance An ANOVA was conducted with condition as a within-subjects factor, and gender and temperamental fear as between-subjects factors. All 2-way interactions were considered. Gender had no influence on infant avoidance. However, there was a significant temperamental fear condition interaction (F(1, 21) ¼ 9.60, po:01). Table 1 shows that high-fear infants were more avoidant in both conditions than low-fear infants. This difference, however, was much more pronounced in the socially anxious condition. Analysis of simple effects showed that there was no significant difference in avoidance between low- and high-fear infants in the non-anxious condition (F(1,34) ¼ 0.22, ns). In the socially anxious condition, however, high-fear infants were significantly more avoidant than the low-fear infants (F(1,34) ¼ 11.00, po:01). The effect size of this difference was strong (d ¼ 1.35). Furthermore, low-fear infants were not significantly more avoidant in the socially anxious condition than the non-anxious condition (F(1,22) ¼ 3.72, ns). By contrast, high-fear infants were clearly more avoidant in the socially anxious condition than the non-anxious condition (F(1,22) ¼ 36.96, po:001). The effect size of this difference was very strong (d ¼ 2:48). This strong effect size reflects the fact that none of the high-fear infants were more avoidant in the non-anxious than the socially anxious condition. Positive emotional tone An ANOVA was conducted with condition as a within-subjects factor, and gender and temperamental fear as between-subjects factors. There were no significant interactions, and neither gender (F(1,21) ¼ 2.26, ns), nor temperamental fear (F(1,21) ¼ 0.26, ns), had an influence on positive emotional tone. Finally, we investigated the possibility that level of fearfulness and avoidance displayed by the infant was related to the level of anxiety expressed by the mothers in the socially anxious condition. Results did not indicate that level of infant affect in the socially anxious condition was related to individual differences on mothers’ ability to feign socially anxious symptoms. Discussion On the basis of findings presented by Murray et al. (2005), and in keeping with research on social referencing (Feinman et al., 1992), we predicted that infants of non-anxious mothers would modify their responses to a stranger when their mothers behaved in a ‘socially anxious’ manner with the stranger, displaying more negative and less positive affect. Our findings broadly support this conclusion and offer a clear demonstration that infants are sensitive to indirect negative maternal messages expressed as social
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anxiety and relating to persons. That is, the impact of the infant viewing a socially anxious interaction between their mother and a stranger carried forward to their own interactions with that stranger. Below, we discuss our findings in more detail and give some consideration to the mechanisms by which infants modify their behavior in response to maternal emotional messages. In the current experiment, infants of non-anxious mothers were given the opportunity to view their mothers behaving in a non-anxious and a socially anxious manner toward strangers (episode 1). Immediately after the observational period, during which every infant looked in the direction of their mother’s face at least twice, infants had the opportunity to interact with the strangers themselves without further input or mediation from their mother (episode 2). Compared to their affective state following their mothers interacting normally with the stranger, following a socially anxious mother–stranger interaction, infants were significantly more fearful and avoidant with the stranger, and they tended to show less positive emotional tone. The most pronounced difference between experimental conditions lay in the level of avoidance shown by infants. However, the impact of maternal social anxiety on infant avoidance was further influenced by infant temperamental fearfulness; in the socially anxious condition, high-fear infants were significantly more avoidant than low-fear infants. Furthermore, only high-fear infants were significantly more avoidant in the socially anxious condition than in the non-anxious condition. Therefore, contrary to our prediction, in the high-fear group increased manifestations of avoidance were context specific. Thus, despite the fact that mothers of high-fear infants judged them on the IBQ to be fearful across a number of situations and over an extended time period, when the mother was behaving in a non-anxious manner high-fear infants were no more fearful or avoidant with the stranger than their low-fear counterparts. However, the combination of fearful infant disposition and maternal manifestations of social anxiety had significant consequences for the quality of infant–stranger interaction. One explanation for the moderating influence of temperamental fearfulness is that infants did not find the non-anxious condition threatening or fear provoking. However, such an interpretation is unlikely because stranger fear is a well-documented phenomenon in infants of this age (Sroufe, 1977) and there were clear behavioral indications of infant fear and avoidance during episode 2 in the non-anxious condition. The more compelling conclusion is that high fear infants were more readily influenced by and, perhaps, more attuned to maternal manifestations of anxiety, and adjusted their behavior accordingly. Rapee (2001) proposed that the acquisition of anxiety via observational channels is likely to be qualified by the temperamental disposition of the infant. Indeed, it is widely held that the development of shyness and social fears, may to some extent, be explained by the temperamental disposition of behavioral inhibition (Kagan, 2000; Kagan, Reznick, & Snidman, 1987). At the broadest level, our findings appear to be consistent with this view. However, placing our findings within the existing literature on infant temperament is not straightforward. Despite reasonably good consistency in maternal reports of temperament (including fearfulness, fear to novelty and wariness) during infancy and toddlerhood (Rothbart, 1981; Sanson, Pedlow, Cann, Prior, & Oberklaid, 1996; Scho¨lmerich, Broberg, & Lamb, 2000), there is little evidence to suggest that maternal reports map well onto behavioral and physiological indices of inhibited temperament (Calkins, Fox, & Marshall, 1996; Scho¨lmerich et al., 2000). The picture is further complicated by the fact that, of the infants who are inhibited during infancy and toddlerhood, a large proportion later become uninhibited (Fox, Henderson, Rubin, Calkins, & Schmidt, 2001; Kagan et al., 1987). In view of these considerations, it is difficult to make firm links between mothers’ reports of fearfulness on the IBQ and underlying temperamental characteristic of the infant. Nevertheless, mothers’ reports do seem to reflect infants’ current behavioral organization regarding distress and/or extended latency to approach an intense or novel stimulus (Rothbart, 1981). Our results suggest that such behavioral organization may represent an important moderating influence on the extent to which infants utilize maternal signals when regulating their own behavior. However, there does not seem to be a simple relationship between behavioral organization and infant responding, whereby more fearful infants are more attuned to maternal signals. Thus, in a study examining infant responses to toys (Blackford & Walden, 1998), and in a study looking at younger infants’ responses to positive maternal messages about a stranger (Feinman & Lewis, 1983), low fear infants more reliably used maternal signals to regulate their behavior than those showing high fear. In future research, therefore, it is important to consider the impact of context (e.g., positive vs. negative signals, objects vs. persons) and infant age on infant behavioral organization.
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The findings of Murray et al. (2005) raised the possibility that mothers influence their infants’ emotional states directly (i.e., in episode 2). In the current experiment we ensured that mothers were unavailable for communication during the second episode (except is so far as infants could see them reading a magazine in a relaxed manner). It therefore appears that infants are able to use an indirect source of information (i.e., observing the mother interacting with stranger) to modify their own behavioral responses to a stranger, a finding already established regarding objects and positive social interactions with strangers (Feinman et al., 1992; Feiring et al., 1984). Our findings do not, however, establish the mechanisms underlying this process or whether such changes in infant responsiveness persist over time. In fact, the existing literature suggests that persistent fears can indeed be established via observational channels (Cook & Mineka, 1989; Gerull & Rapee, 2002), even in infants, but this conclusion needs to be tempered by the fact that such persistence has only been shown in response to specific non-social fear-provoking stimuli. In accounting for infant sensitivity to maternal signals and subsequent contingent behavioral modification, various mechanisms can be hypothesized. The first and least complicated mechanism is emotional modification or contagion (Feinman et al., 1992). Within the current experiment, such a mechanism implies that the infant’s mood is affected by the mother’s emotional state in episode 1 and this emotional shift continues to influence infant behavior in episode 2. Such a mechanism does not imply that the infant appreciates the referential quality of the mother’s message, but it does imply that the change in infant affect has a persistent quality. Given the carry-over effects already documented in the social referencing literature (Feinman et al., 1992), we might therefore expect that order of condition presentation would influence infant responding to the stranger. In fact, we found very little evidence of any asymmetrical effects for affect by order of condition presentation and infants very quickly returned to a positive or neutral demeanor when the stranger departed, and very few mothers had to intervene between conditions. Also inconsistent with an account of infant behavior based solely on emotional contagion is the fact that, in the non-anxious condition, when mothers were trained to curtail expressions of social anxiety, infants still expressed some fearfulness and avoidance in response to the stranger. This behavior indicates that infant responding to the stranger is based, to some extent, on the infant’s appraisal of threat regarding the stranger. Our findings suggest that infant behavior modification in response to maternal social anxiety occurs via either observational learning or social referencing (Baldwin & Moses, 1996; Bandura, 1977). Whilst both processes can account for the current findings, they imply rather different underlying mechanisms. Within a social referencing framework, the intentionality of the infant is given higher status; the infant is conceptualized as capable of actively seeking information from an independent emotional agent (Baldwin & Moses, 1996). In the current experiment there was some evidence that infants looked more to their mothers during episode 2 of the socially anxious condition, consistent with an active attempt to seek maternal feedback concerning the stranger. By contrast, observational learning does not imply such advanced abilities in the infant, but it also faces some explanatory problems. First, it is not clear how the motivational structure of the acquisition of social fears would operate (see Bandura, 1977). Furthermore, observational learning accounts of the kind of effects we have observed have been criticized because infants frequently fail to reproduce modeled behaviors, and they often act in ways emotionally consistent with the modeled behavior but without actually reproducing them (Baldwin & Moses, 1996). Teasing apart these two accounts should be the focus of future research. Finally, our findings did not show a significant gender effect on infant fearfulness or avoidance. However, it must be noted that the sample size was small and, indeed, there were trends within the data to suggest that a larger sample may have revealed girls to be more fearful and sensitive to maternal anxiety, as previously suggested (Gerull & Rapee, 2002). It is noteworthy that gender effects in the social referencing literature have traditionally been small and equivocal (Feinman et al., 1992). In conjunction with the results of Murray et al. (2005), the findings presented here throw light on the process involved in the intergenerational transmission of social anxiety. These studies suggest that the influence of the environment on later social anxiety may begin in social processes occurring in infancy. Using a small sample, the current experiment demonstrated that infants are sensitive to maternal manifestations of social anxiety and modulate their own affective responses and behavior in line with such maternal expressions.
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Acknowledgments We would like to thank Daniele Severi and Joanna Pearson for their assistance in conducting this research.
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Behaviour Research and Therapy 44 (2006) 1165–1175 www.elsevier.com/locate/brat
Transmission of social anxiety from mother to infant: An experimental study using a social referencing paradigm Marc de Rosnay, Peter J. Cooper, Nicolas Tsigaras, Lynne Murray Winnicott Research Unit, School of Psychology, University of Reading, Earley Gate, Whiteknights Road, Reading RG6 6AL, UK Received 22 December 2004; received in revised form 29 July 2005; accepted 6 September 2005
Abstract In this experiment we investigated the impact of indirect expressions of maternal social anxiety on infant interactions with a stranger. A social referencing paradigm was used in which infants first observed their mothers interacting with a stranger and then interacted with the stranger themselves. Mothers made no direct communicative gestures to the infant concerning the stranger throughout the procedure. There were two experimental conditions experienced by all mother–infant pairs (N ¼ 24; 12 boys)—non-anxious and socially anxious—and there were two male strangers. Infants were between 12 and 14 months (M ¼ 12:8, SD ¼ :76). Order of condition and stranger presentation were counterbalanced. Before testing, mothers, none of whom were significantly socially anxious, were trained to behave in a nonanxious and a socially anxious manner on the basis of clinical and empirical descriptions of social phobia. The results showed that, compared to their responses following their mothers interacting normally with a stranger, following a socially anxious mother–stranger interaction, infants were significantly more fearful and avoidant with the stranger. Infantstranger avoidance was further modified by infant temperament; high fear infants were more avoidant in the socially anxious condition than low-fear infants. We discuss these findings in light of the possible mechanisms underpinning infant affective and behavioral responsiveness. r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Anxiety; Etiology; Modeling; Social cognition; Social referencing; Infants
Introduction Current accounts of childhood shyness and social anxiety stress that such behavioral disturbances most likely arise from a combination of constitutional vulnerability and certain environmental factors (Crozier & Alden, 2001; Rapee, 1995; Wood, McLeod, Sigman, Hwang, & Chu, 2003). The contribution of genetic factors to shyness and social phobia appears, in fact, to be modest, and the shared environment and, in particular, parenting is likely to play an important role (Eley, 2001; Kendler, Neale, Kessler, & Heath et al., 1992). To date, parenting variables, such as over-control, over-protection, and a lack of encouragement and acceptance, have been emphasized, all of which concern the parents’ direct management of their child Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 118 378 6667; fax: +44 118 378 6665.
E-mail address: [email protected] (M. de Rosnay). 0005-7967/$ - see front matter r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.brat.2005.09.003
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(Burgess, Rubin, Chea, & Nelson, 2001; Rapee, 1997; Schmidt, Polak, & Spooner, 2001; Wood et al., 2003). However, it is also possible that young children acquire a socially fearful disposition vicariously, through their observations of anxious caregiver responses to social encounters; that is, through a modeling process (Bandura, 1977). Evidence for such a process in the context of the development of social anxiety has so far been limited, and has principally been based on questionnaire reports. Thus, Muris and colleagues showed that higher levels of ‘expressed’ anxiety in parents are linked to higher levels of reported childhood fears and worries (Gruener, Muris, & Merckelbach, 1999; Muris, Steerneman, Merckelbach, & Meesters, 1996). Understanding the precise nature of this link on the basis of questionnaire data is, however, problematic: the parental behaviors leading to such childhood outcomes are not objectively established; it is not possible to know whether specific parental behaviors or general parental styles are implicated; and it is unclear in which contexts the transmission of anxiety from parent to child is most likely to occur (Wood et al., 2003). Clearer evidence for the transmission of fear through modeling is available in relation to non-social stimuli, such as the acquisition of specific fears in primates (Cook & Mineka, 1989). With regard to human populations, Gerull and Rapee (2002) found that enactment by mothers of either fearful/disgusted or else happy/encouraging emotional responses to two potentially fear-provoking toys influenced the behavior of their 15–20 month old toddlers: avoidant and fearful child responses were shown to the toy which had been associated with the fearful/disgusted emotional maternal enactment. This finding is important because it provides a clear demonstration of the modeling of fear in young children. The findings of Gerull and Rapee (2002) are consistent with those of a broader literature concerning infants’ capacity to use social information to inform their behaviors. Between 9 and 12 months of age infants become increasingly aware of the agency of other individuals with respect to referents (i.e., objects, persons and events; Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasello, 1998), and they modify their responses to the referent on the basis of another person’s emotional response to it, a process known as social referencing (Feinman, Roberts, Hsieh, Sawyer, & Swanson, 1992). In considering the transmission of anxiety, it is notable within the social referencing literature that negative emotional messages relating to objects (i.e., fear and disgust) appear to have a stronger impact on infant behavioral responses than positive ones (Hornik, Risenhoover, & Gunnar, 1987; Moses, Baldwin, Rosicky, & Tidball, 2001), and that infants are particularly likely to use others’ responses to guide their own behavior when they encounter ambiguity or experience feelings of uncertainty toward the object (Gunnar & Stone, 1984; Sorce, Emde, Campos, & Klinnert, 1985). With respect to social referencing processes concerning persons, there is a smaller literature that has focused on maternal modeling of positive responses. Feiring, Lewis, and Starr (1984) and Feinman and Lewis (1983) both showed that infants were more likely to interact with a stranger in a positive (or less negative) manner when their mother had given positive emotional messages about the stranger. Feiring et al. showed that infants were sensitive to a positive message about a target stranger delivered by a second stranger, although the effects on infant behavior were less pronounced. Murray and colleagues (Murray, Cooper, de Rosnay, Pearson, & Sack, 2005) have argued that the process of social referencing, whereby infants use their mother’s responses to inform their own emotional responses and behavior, may be particularly important in relation to the development of social anxiety, since the development of social referencing coincides with the onset of ‘stranger fear’ (Sroufe, 1977). Thus, they proposed that it is the combination of the infant’s sensitivity to parental emotional responses, and in particular to the expression of negative emotion, coupled with the infant’s own natural apprehensiveness in relation to unfamiliar persons, which constitutes the setting conditions for the early transmission of social anxiety from parent to child. They further speculated that infants of mothers with social phobia, who are repeatedly exposed to signs of maternal anxiety in the context of encounters with unfamiliar people, may, via a social referencing process, adopt these distinctive patterns of interpersonal responsiveness themselves (Murray et al., 2005). Murray and colleagues used a social referencing paradigm to examine the development of socially anxious responses to strangers in a large-scale prospective longitudinal study of a community sample of mothers with social phobia and their infants, together with non-anxious control mother–infant pairs. In this study, the infant initially observed his or her mother interacting with a female stranger (i.e., a vicarious, modeling condition); and in a second episode, the stranger approached the infant and interacted with him or her, during which time the mother could engage with the infant (as well as demonstrate her own emotional response to the stranger). When the infants were 10 months of age, mothers with social phobia displayed more
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signs of anxiety than control mothers in both episodes. In addition, in the second episode, they showed less encouragement of the infant’s engagement with the stranger. When re-tested in the same paradigm at 14 months, the infants of mothers with social phobia had become significantly more avoidant of the stranger over the 4-month period than infants of control mothers, and this effect was intensified in the presence of high levels of manifest maternal anxiety, particularly during the second episode. Although the methodology of the study by Murray and colleagues described above has considerable strengths, the fact that it involved semi-naturalistic observations, in which a number of elements of the mothers’ behavior were related to each other, raises questions about the precise manner in which infant behavior was affected. The fact that maternal anxiety displayed in episode 2, when the infant interacted with the stranger, had a greater impact on infant responsiveness than maternal anxiety displayed in episode 1, when the infant simply observed the mother–stranger interaction, raises the possibility that the infant’s response to the stranger was under relatively direct maternal control. This, in turn, raises the question of whether simple observation of maternal anxiety alone can significantly influence the occurrence of anxious infant responses in a social interaction. The current study was designed to complement that of Murray and colleagues (2005) and addresses the specific question of whether infant social responsiveness is influenced by indirect maternal messages concerning a stranger conveyed via infant observations of mother–stranger interactions. Specifically, we hypothesized that when infants (of non-anxious mothers) saw their mothers behaving in a socially anxious manner towards a stranger they would subsequently modify their own reactions to that stranger. In keeping with the findings of Murray and colleagues, and those of others (e.g., Gerull & Rapee, 2002), we predicted that, compared to observation of non-anxious maternal behavior, observation of socially anxious maternal behavior would cause infants to become more wary (fearful and avoidant) and exhibit fewer emotionally positive behaviors. In order to draw a firm conclusion about infant sensitivity to maternal responding, we used a repeated measures design in which it was possible to evaluate the reactions of the same infant under both socially anxious and non-anxious conditions. Because of the importance placed on infant temperament in the development of social anxiety (Kagan, 1999), we also included a measure of infant temperamental fearfulness (Rothbart, 1978, 1981). Given that stranger approach is inherently fear-provoking for 1-year-olds (Sroufe, 1977), we expected that high-fear infants would show more wariness to the stranger than low-fear infants in both non-anxious and anxious experimental conditions. Since there is some recent evidence that girls may be more sensitive to expressions of maternal affect, and modify their behavior more strongly when their mothers express fear towards a referent (Blackford & Walden, 1998; Gerull & Rapee, 2002), we considered whether boys and girls responded differently in the experimental situation. Method Participants The participants were 12 boys and 12 girls, between 12 and 14 months of age (M ¼ 12.8; SD ¼ :76), and their mothers. Mother–infant pairs were recruited from the Reading area, UK, through National Health Service Health Visitors. The sample represents a randomly selected sub-group, derived from a large consecutive series, of mothers scoring in the low range for social anxiety (see Murray et al., 2005). All mothers were White English speakers. Procedure Participants were assessed at the Winnicott Research Unit, University of Reading. Mothers were invited to attend the Unit and take part in a study about infant shyness. They were told that they would participate in the study as a confederate, and they were also sent a copy of the Infant Behavioral Questionnaire (Rothbart, 1978, 1981). The experiment was run in two phases: training and testing. In the training phase the overall experimental procedure was explained to the mother: On each of two occasions a different male stranger would enter the
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room and engage her in conversation; however, on each occasion she was to behave in a different way; on one occasion she was to respond as she would in an everyday interaction with someone whom she does not know but towards whom she holds no negative feelings (non-anxious condition), and on the other occasion she was to pretend that she felt ‘nervous’ and a little bit ‘fearful’ about interacting with the stranger (socially anxious condition). Everyday situations were used to illustrate these two dispositions. Two short videos, showing a woman in each condition, were used for training and illustration. Each video was shown twice. On the first screening, the video was viewed without sound and attention was given to specific behaviors. On the second screening, attention was given to qualitative aspects of conversation. During both screenings the researcher paused the video and highlighted important features. Mothers were then asked to rehearse the non-anxious and anxious responses along with the researcher. Mothers were also trained not to look at their infant during the two experimental conditions. However, they were asked to interact with their infant in a normal manner between conditions. In the testing phase the mother and infant sat 3.0 m apart; each was positioned approximately 3.5 m away from the doorway. The infant was strapped into a highchair. Immediately to the infant’s left was an empty chair for the stranger. Some magazines were placed next to the mother’s chair. The experimental phase comprised two episodes. In the first, the stranger knocked and entered the room, staying near the doorway. The stranger greeted the mother and engaged her in conversation for 90 s concerning the activities and experiences of the infant and the family. During this time, the stranger stood facing the mother and did not attend to the infant. In the second episode, the stranger first told the mother that he was going to talk to the infant and asked the mother to pick up a magazine and disregard the infant. Having instructed the mother, the stranger greeted the infant, and then made a graded approach, increasing his engagement with the infant, including offering the infant a small toy, and ended by stretching out his arms in a position to pick the infant up, before leaving the room. The stranger’s interaction with the infant lasted approximately 60 s. Before the entry of the second stranger, the mother was given time to make sure her infant was settled. Typically, no maternal intervention was needed. The second stranger then entered and the two episodes were repeated. Mothers were told immediately before the testing phase began which condition they should enact first. Strangers were blind to the condition at entry. The experiment was filmed using three cameras; one camera gave a full-face image of the infant, with the stranger. The other two cameras provided a split screen image showing mother and infant. Experimental conditions and design All infants experienced two conditions: mother interacting in a non-anxious manner with a stranger, and mother interacting in a socially anxious manner with a stranger. Order of condition was counter-balanced, as was the order of stranger presentation (resulting in four combinations). Equal numbers of boys and girls experienced each combination. Materials and measures Maternal training material Two videos were compiled of a woman role-playing both a non-anxious and a socially anxious interaction with a stranger, following the procedure outlined for the first phase of the experiment. The behaviors in the socially anxious video were based on clinical descriptions of social phobia (Clark & Wells, 1995; McNeil, Ries, & Turk, 1995), and observations of maternal social anxiety in a social referencing paradigm (see Murray et al., 2005). These included poor eye contact, stiff posture, wringing hands, touching face, and facial indications of anxiety (e.g., lip biting). Conversational dimensions included limited responses to questions. The behaviors in the non-anxious video were good eye contact, relaxed posture, and an open, friendly expression. Conversational dimensions included full answers to questions (without excessive elaboration), and a conversational tone that encouraged further dialogue. To verify the validity of maternal training, a research assistant, blind to the study hypotheses, rated maternal anxiety in episode 1 for the whole sample on a five-point scale (1: no anxiety–5: pervasive social anxiety; adapted from Murray et al., 2005). Mothers’ mean anxiety scores in the non-anxious and in the
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socially anxious conditions were 1.8 (SD ¼ :78) and 4.1 (SD ¼ :68), respectively. A paired-samples t-test revealed that this difference was highly significant, tð23Þ ¼ 15:01, po:01. Crucially, all mothers were rated as more anxious in the socially anxious condition than in the non-anxious condition. Strangers Both strangers were males in their mid-20s of approximately equal height and coloring. Before the study began, the strangers were fully trained in the procedure. With respect to the infant, strangers were taught to make a graded approach and converse in a reliable manner. With respect to the mother, strangers memorized a scripted set of questions so that they could converse in a reliable and relaxed manner. Infant temperament Temperament was assessed using the Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ; Rothbart, 1978, 1981). The IBQ assesses six temperamental dimensions: activity level, smiling and laughter, fear, distress to limitations, soothability, and orienting. For the purpose of the current study, the fear dimension was of primary interest. This is defined as the child’s distress and/or extended latency to approach an intense or novel stimulus (Rothbart, 1981). It has been shown to have reasonably good temporal stability and convergent validity between 3 and 9 months (Rothbart, 1986). Infants were divided into low and high temperamental fear groups using a median split. The mean temperamental fear score was 2.6 (SD ¼ :66), ranging from 1.2 to 4.1. The mean scores for the low and high groups were 2.2 (SD ¼ :48) and 3.1 (SD ¼ :45), respectively. Internal reliability for the fear scale (13 items) was good (Cronbach a ¼ :70). Infant behavior during the experiment In episode 1, infant looks in the direction of the mother’s face were counted for the first minute to ensure that the infant did indeed observe the mother in each experimental condition. In episode 2, when the infant was as interacting with the stranger, total infant looks in the direction of the mother’s face were counted. Three dimensions of infant affect were also assessed in episode 2: fearfulness, avoidance and positive emotional tone. Fearfulness covered a broad range of behaviors variously defined as fearfulness or wariness (Goldsmith & Rothbart, 1999; Schaffer, Greenwood, & Parry, 1972; Sroufe, 1977; Stevenson-Hinde & Shouldice, 1990). It included a fearful or wary expression, a cry face, fretting, crying, sudden stilling of activity, tense or frozen posture. Avoidance covered infant attempts to increase distance from or avoid contact with the stranger; this included leaning or pulling away, turning or looking away, averting gaze or avoiding eye contact, pushing the stranger away, and placing an arm between the self and the stranger. Positive emotional tone covered all positive aspects of the infant’s mood, and included smiling, positive vocalizations, communicative gestures (e.g., showing), laughter, and joyous excitation (e.g., waving legs and arms in an excited and happy manner). Scoring All videos were scored by the first author, who was blind to the experimental conditions. Videos showing only the infant were scored, and episode 2 of both conditions was always scored before episode 1 so that there could be no cues about which condition the infant was experiencing. Infant looks to the mother’s face in episodes 1 and 2 were straightforward counts. Looks to the mother’s face in episode 2 were counted over the total period during which infant affect was assessed (see below). Infant affect dimensions were assessed in episode 2 during the stranger’s graded approach and interaction with the infant, which was divided into five phases of approximately 10–12 s for the purposes of scoring: (1) calls infant’s name, approaches, and seats himself next to the infant; (2) talks to the infant; (3) shows the infant a toy; (4) reaches out and lightly touches infant’s leg while continuing to talk with the infant; (5) stands up and stretches out his arms, as if to lift the infant. Each affect dimension was rated on a five-point scale (1 absent—5 very frequent) for each of the five phases. A second trained researcher, who was blind to the hypotheses of the experiment, scored videos from four subjects, chosen at random from the sample (i.e., eight clips; 16.7% of the sample). The inter-rater Pearson correlation coefficient for infant looks to mother’s face indicated consistency for this measure (rð8Þ ¼ :97;
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po:001). For infant affect, percentage agreement and weighted-k’s were, respectively, as follows: 79% and .85 for avoidance, 75% and .83 for fearfulness, 85% and .85 for positive emotional tone. Results For infant affect in each of the three dimensions, distributions of total scores approximated normality and the mean score across phases was calculated. Before proceeding with the main analyses, we checked infant responses to the two strangers. There were no significant differences, and stranger effects were therefore not considered further. Because of the small sample size, we first examined whether there was a relationship between gender and temperamental fear. Girls were not significantly more likely to be in the high fear group than boys, w2 ð1; N ¼ 24Þ ¼ :67, ns. Thus, for each infant behavior, we compared the non-anxious and socially anxious conditions, first examining whether order of condition presentation influenced infant responding, and then accounting for the possible influences of gender and temperamental fear. An a-level of .05 was used for all statistical tests except analyses of simple effects, where an a of .01 was employed. Infant looking In episode 1, during the stranger–mother conversation, all infants looked in the direction of their mother’s face at least twice. In the non-anxious condition, the mean number of looks was 4.8 (SD ¼ 1:91), range 2–10. In the socially anxious condition, the mean number of looks to mother was 4.7 (SD ¼ 1:52), range 2–8. We first examined whether infant looking to mother was influenced by order of condition presentation. An ANOVA was conducted with condition as a within-subjects factor and order as a between-subjects factor. There was no interaction between condition and order, and there was also no main effect for condition (F(1,22) ¼ 0.04, ns) or order (F(1,22) ¼ 0, ns). To determine whether infant looking was influenced by infant gender or temperamental fear, a second ANOVA was conducted with condition as a within-subjects factor and gender and temperamental fearfulness as between-subjects factors. All two-way interactions were considered. There were no significant two-way interactions, and there was no main effect for condition (F(1,21) ¼ 0.04, ns), gender (F(1,21) ¼ 0.38, ns), or temperamental fear (F(1,21) ¼ 0.38, ns). In episode 2, during the stranger–infant interaction, not all infants looked in the direction of their mother’s face. In the non-anxious condition, the mean number of looks was 0.9 (SD ¼ 0:90), range 0–3. In the socially anxious condition, the mean number of looks to mother was 1.8 (SD ¼ 1:15), range 0–4. We first examined whether infant looking to mother was influenced by order of condition presentation. An ANOVA was conducted with condition as a within-subjects factor and order as a between-subjects factor. There was no interaction between condition and order (F(1,22) ¼ 0.50, ns). However, there was a significant main effect for condition (F(1,22) ¼ 8.87, po:01), with infants looking more often in the direction of their mothers’ face in the socially anxious condition; and there was a significant main effect of order (F(1,22) ¼ 4.88, po:05), with infants who experienced the non-anxious condition first looking in the direction of their mothers’ face more often over both conditions (M ¼ 3:3, SD ¼ 1:29) than infants who experienced the socially anxious condition first (M ¼ 2:0, SD ¼ 1:48). To determine whether infant looking was influenced by infant gender or temperamental fear, a second ANOVA was conducted with condition as a within-subjects factor and gender and temperamental fearfulness as between-subjects factors. All two-way interactions were considered. No significant interactions were identified. Once again, there was a significant main effect for condition (F(1,21) ¼ 8.61; po:01), but there was no effect for gender (F(1,21) ¼ 0.09, ns), or temperamental fear (F(1,21) ¼ 0.94, ns). Infant affect The mean affect scores in the non-anxious and in the socially anxious conditions during episode 2 were 2.6 (SD ¼ :80) and 3.0 (SD ¼ :71), respectively for fearfulness, 2.4 (SD ¼ :61) and 3.1 (SD ¼ :74) for avoidance, and 1.5 (SD ¼ :46) and 1.3 (SD ¼ :44) for positive emotional tone. For each affect dimension, we first explored the possibility that order of presentation influenced infant affect. ANOVAS were conducted for each
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Table 1 Mean avoidance scores (and standard deviations) for high and low fear infants in episode 2 (N ¼ 24) Condition
Non-anxious Socially anxious
Testing episode Low fear (n ¼ 12)
High fear (n ¼ 12)
2.32 (.51) 2.65 (.54)
2.43 (.71) 3.48 (.68)
affect, with condition as a within-subjects factor and order as a between subjects factor. There was no indication that order of condition presentation influenced infant affect. Infant fearfulness An ANOVA was conducted with condition as a within-subjects factor, and gender and temperamental fear as between-subjects factors. All 2-way interactions were considered. There were no significant interactions. Neither gender (F(1,21) ¼ 3.57, ns), nor temperamental fear (F(1,21) ¼ .59, ns), had a significant influence on infant fearfulness. Infants were, however, significantly more fearful in the socially anxious condition than the non-anxious condition. (F(1,21) ¼ 7.93, po:05). The effect size of this difference was medium (d ¼ :58). Avoidance An ANOVA was conducted with condition as a within-subjects factor, and gender and temperamental fear as between-subjects factors. All 2-way interactions were considered. Gender had no influence on infant avoidance. However, there was a significant temperamental fear condition interaction (F(1, 21) ¼ 9.60, po:01). Table 1 shows that high-fear infants were more avoidant in both conditions than low-fear infants. This difference, however, was much more pronounced in the socially anxious condition. Analysis of simple effects showed that there was no significant difference in avoidance between low- and high-fear infants in the non-anxious condition (F(1,34) ¼ 0.22, ns). In the socially anxious condition, however, high-fear infants were significantly more avoidant than the low-fear infants (F(1,34) ¼ 11.00, po:01). The effect size of this difference was strong (d ¼ 1.35). Furthermore, low-fear infants were not significantly more avoidant in the socially anxious condition than the non-anxious condition (F(1,22) ¼ 3.72, ns). By contrast, high-fear infants were clearly more avoidant in the socially anxious condition than the non-anxious condition (F(1,22) ¼ 36.96, po:001). The effect size of this difference was very strong (d ¼ 2:48). This strong effect size reflects the fact that none of the high-fear infants were more avoidant in the non-anxious than the socially anxious condition. Positive emotional tone An ANOVA was conducted with condition as a within-subjects factor, and gender and temperamental fear as between-subjects factors. There were no significant interactions, and neither gender (F(1,21) ¼ 2.26, ns), nor temperamental fear (F(1,21) ¼ 0.26, ns), had an influence on positive emotional tone. Finally, we investigated the possibility that level of fearfulness and avoidance displayed by the infant was related to the level of anxiety expressed by the mothers in the socially anxious condition. Results did not indicate that level of infant affect in the socially anxious condition was related to individual differences on mothers’ ability to feign socially anxious symptoms. Discussion On the basis of findings presented by Murray et al. (2005), and in keeping with research on social referencing (Feinman et al., 1992), we predicted that infants of non-anxious mothers would modify their responses to a stranger when their mothers behaved in a ‘socially anxious’ manner with the stranger, displaying more negative and less positive affect. Our findings broadly support this conclusion and offer a clear demonstration that infants are sensitive to indirect negative maternal messages expressed as social
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anxiety and relating to persons. That is, the impact of the infant viewing a socially anxious interaction between their mother and a stranger carried forward to their own interactions with that stranger. Below, we discuss our findings in more detail and give some consideration to the mechanisms by which infants modify their behavior in response to maternal emotional messages. In the current experiment, infants of non-anxious mothers were given the opportunity to view their mothers behaving in a non-anxious and a socially anxious manner toward strangers (episode 1). Immediately after the observational period, during which every infant looked in the direction of their mother’s face at least twice, infants had the opportunity to interact with the strangers themselves without further input or mediation from their mother (episode 2). Compared to their affective state following their mothers interacting normally with the stranger, following a socially anxious mother–stranger interaction, infants were significantly more fearful and avoidant with the stranger, and they tended to show less positive emotional tone. The most pronounced difference between experimental conditions lay in the level of avoidance shown by infants. However, the impact of maternal social anxiety on infant avoidance was further influenced by infant temperamental fearfulness; in the socially anxious condition, high-fear infants were significantly more avoidant than low-fear infants. Furthermore, only high-fear infants were significantly more avoidant in the socially anxious condition than in the non-anxious condition. Therefore, contrary to our prediction, in the high-fear group increased manifestations of avoidance were context specific. Thus, despite the fact that mothers of high-fear infants judged them on the IBQ to be fearful across a number of situations and over an extended time period, when the mother was behaving in a non-anxious manner high-fear infants were no more fearful or avoidant with the stranger than their low-fear counterparts. However, the combination of fearful infant disposition and maternal manifestations of social anxiety had significant consequences for the quality of infant–stranger interaction. One explanation for the moderating influence of temperamental fearfulness is that infants did not find the non-anxious condition threatening or fear provoking. However, such an interpretation is unlikely because stranger fear is a well-documented phenomenon in infants of this age (Sroufe, 1977) and there were clear behavioral indications of infant fear and avoidance during episode 2 in the non-anxious condition. The more compelling conclusion is that high fear infants were more readily influenced by and, perhaps, more attuned to maternal manifestations of anxiety, and adjusted their behavior accordingly. Rapee (2001) proposed that the acquisition of anxiety via observational channels is likely to be qualified by the temperamental disposition of the infant. Indeed, it is widely held that the development of shyness and social fears, may to some extent, be explained by the temperamental disposition of behavioral inhibition (Kagan, 2000; Kagan, Reznick, & Snidman, 1987). At the broadest level, our findings appear to be consistent with this view. However, placing our findings within the existing literature on infant temperament is not straightforward. Despite reasonably good consistency in maternal reports of temperament (including fearfulness, fear to novelty and wariness) during infancy and toddlerhood (Rothbart, 1981; Sanson, Pedlow, Cann, Prior, & Oberklaid, 1996; Scho¨lmerich, Broberg, & Lamb, 2000), there is little evidence to suggest that maternal reports map well onto behavioral and physiological indices of inhibited temperament (Calkins, Fox, & Marshall, 1996; Scho¨lmerich et al., 2000). The picture is further complicated by the fact that, of the infants who are inhibited during infancy and toddlerhood, a large proportion later become uninhibited (Fox, Henderson, Rubin, Calkins, & Schmidt, 2001; Kagan et al., 1987). In view of these considerations, it is difficult to make firm links between mothers’ reports of fearfulness on the IBQ and underlying temperamental characteristic of the infant. Nevertheless, mothers’ reports do seem to reflect infants’ current behavioral organization regarding distress and/or extended latency to approach an intense or novel stimulus (Rothbart, 1981). Our results suggest that such behavioral organization may represent an important moderating influence on the extent to which infants utilize maternal signals when regulating their own behavior. However, there does not seem to be a simple relationship between behavioral organization and infant responding, whereby more fearful infants are more attuned to maternal signals. Thus, in a study examining infant responses to toys (Blackford & Walden, 1998), and in a study looking at younger infants’ responses to positive maternal messages about a stranger (Feinman & Lewis, 1983), low fear infants more reliably used maternal signals to regulate their behavior than those showing high fear. In future research, therefore, it is important to consider the impact of context (e.g., positive vs. negative signals, objects vs. persons) and infant age on infant behavioral organization.
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The findings of Murray et al. (2005) raised the possibility that mothers influence their infants’ emotional states directly (i.e., in episode 2). In the current experiment we ensured that mothers were unavailable for communication during the second episode (except is so far as infants could see them reading a magazine in a relaxed manner). It therefore appears that infants are able to use an indirect source of information (i.e., observing the mother interacting with stranger) to modify their own behavioral responses to a stranger, a finding already established regarding objects and positive social interactions with strangers (Feinman et al., 1992; Feiring et al., 1984). Our findings do not, however, establish the mechanisms underlying this process or whether such changes in infant responsiveness persist over time. In fact, the existing literature suggests that persistent fears can indeed be established via observational channels (Cook & Mineka, 1989; Gerull & Rapee, 2002), even in infants, but this conclusion needs to be tempered by the fact that such persistence has only been shown in response to specific non-social fear-provoking stimuli. In accounting for infant sensitivity to maternal signals and subsequent contingent behavioral modification, various mechanisms can be hypothesized. The first and least complicated mechanism is emotional modification or contagion (Feinman et al., 1992). Within the current experiment, such a mechanism implies that the infant’s mood is affected by the mother’s emotional state in episode 1 and this emotional shift continues to influence infant behavior in episode 2. Such a mechanism does not imply that the infant appreciates the referential quality of the mother’s message, but it does imply that the change in infant affect has a persistent quality. Given the carry-over effects already documented in the social referencing literature (Feinman et al., 1992), we might therefore expect that order of condition presentation would influence infant responding to the stranger. In fact, we found very little evidence of any asymmetrical effects for affect by order of condition presentation and infants very quickly returned to a positive or neutral demeanor when the stranger departed, and very few mothers had to intervene between conditions. Also inconsistent with an account of infant behavior based solely on emotional contagion is the fact that, in the non-anxious condition, when mothers were trained to curtail expressions of social anxiety, infants still expressed some fearfulness and avoidance in response to the stranger. This behavior indicates that infant responding to the stranger is based, to some extent, on the infant’s appraisal of threat regarding the stranger. Our findings suggest that infant behavior modification in response to maternal social anxiety occurs via either observational learning or social referencing (Baldwin & Moses, 1996; Bandura, 1977). Whilst both processes can account for the current findings, they imply rather different underlying mechanisms. Within a social referencing framework, the intentionality of the infant is given higher status; the infant is conceptualized as capable of actively seeking information from an independent emotional agent (Baldwin & Moses, 1996). In the current experiment there was some evidence that infants looked more to their mothers during episode 2 of the socially anxious condition, consistent with an active attempt to seek maternal feedback concerning the stranger. By contrast, observational learning does not imply such advanced abilities in the infant, but it also faces some explanatory problems. First, it is not clear how the motivational structure of the acquisition of social fears would operate (see Bandura, 1977). Furthermore, observational learning accounts of the kind of effects we have observed have been criticized because infants frequently fail to reproduce modeled behaviors, and they often act in ways emotionally consistent with the modeled behavior but without actually reproducing them (Baldwin & Moses, 1996). Teasing apart these two accounts should be the focus of future research. Finally, our findings did not show a significant gender effect on infant fearfulness or avoidance. However, it must be noted that the sample size was small and, indeed, there were trends within the data to suggest that a larger sample may have revealed girls to be more fearful and sensitive to maternal anxiety, as previously suggested (Gerull & Rapee, 2002). It is noteworthy that gender effects in the social referencing literature have traditionally been small and equivocal (Feinman et al., 1992). In conjunction with the results of Murray et al. (2005), the findings presented here throw light on the process involved in the intergenerational transmission of social anxiety. These studies suggest that the influence of the environment on later social anxiety may begin in social processes occurring in infancy. Using a small sample, the current experiment demonstrated that infants are sensitive to maternal manifestations of social anxiety and modulate their own affective responses and behavior in line with such maternal expressions.
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Acknowledgments We would like to thank Daniele Severi and Joanna Pearson for their assistance in conducting this research.
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