Citation

Thompson-Booth C, Viding E, Puetz VB, Rutherford HJV, Mayes LC, McCrory EJ. Emotion 2018; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Affiliation

Division of Psychology & Language Sciences, University College London.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, American Psychological Association)

DOI

10.1037/emo0000464

PMID

30234333

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that the experience of childhood maltreatment can influence recognition and processing of emotional cues and that these effects can extend into adulthood. Such alterations in cognitive processing may have important implications for processing of infant affect and parenting behavior. This study investigated whether the experience of childhood maltreatment altered attentional processing of infant faces in a community sample of mothers, using an established visual search task. Increased scores on a measure of childhood maltreatment were associated with decreased preferential bias toward infant faces (indexed by slower reaction times to infant compared to adult faces). Exploratory analysis of the relationship between attentional processing and actual "own child" parenting behavior (as measured by a video-recorded mother-child interaction) found that lower attentional bias to infant faces mediated the relationship between higher levels of childhood maltreatment and lower levels of mother-infant Dyadic Reciprocity. This suggests that childhood maltreatment may have enduring effects on the preferential processing of infant cues as well as parenting behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record

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Language: en