Shame,guilt, and facial emotion processing: initial evidence for a positive relationship between guilt-proneness and facial emotion recognition ability

Shame and guilt are closely related self-conscious emotions of negative affect that give rise to divergent self-regulatory and motivational behaviours. While guilt-proneness has demonstrated positive relationships with self-report measures of empathy and adaptive interpersonal functioning, shame-proneness tends to be unrelated or inversely related to empathy and is associated with interpersonal difficulties. At present, no research has examined relationships between shame and guilt-proneness with facial emotion recognition ability. Participants (N?=?363) completed measures of shame and guilt-proneness along with a facial emotion recognition task which assessed the ability to identify displays of anger, sadness, happiness, fear, disgust, and shame. Guilt-proneness was consistently positively associated with facial emotion recognition ability. In contrast, shame-proneness was unrelated to capacity for facial emotion recognition. Findings provide support for theory arguing that guilt and empathy operate synergistically and may also help explain the inverse relationship between guilt-proneness and propensity for aggressive behaviour.     

Analyzing temporal patterns of infant sleep and negative affective behavior: a comparison between different statistical models

Objective

Variability in infant sleep and negative affective behavior (NAB) is a developmental phenomenon that has long been of interest to researchers and clinicians. However, analyses and delineation of such temporal patterns were often limited to basic statistical approaches, which may prevent adequate identification of meaningful variation within these patterns. Modern statistical procedures such as additive models may detect specific patterns of temporal variation in infant behavior more effectively.

Method

Hundred and twenty-one mothers were asked to record different behaviors of their 4–44 weeks old healthy infants by diaries for three days consecutively. Circadian patterns as well as individual trajectories and day-to-day variability of infant sleep and NAB were modeled with generalized linear models (GLMs) including a linear and quadratic polynomial for time, a GLM with a polynomial of the 8th order, a GLM with a harmonic function, a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) with a polynomial of the 8th order, a generalized additive model, and a generalized additive mixed model (GAMM).

Results

The semi-parametric model GAMM was found to fit the data of infant sleep better than any other parametric model used. GLMM with a polynomial of the 8th order and GAMM modeled temporal patterns of infant NAB equally well, although the GLMM exhibited a slightly better model fit while GAMM was easier to interpret. Besides the well-known evening clustering in infant NAB we found a significant second peak in NAB around midday that was not affected by the constant decline in the amounts of NAB across the 3-day study period.

Conclusion

Using advanced statistical procedures (GAMM and GLMM) even small variations and phenomena in infant behavior can be reliably detected. Future studies investigating variability and temporal patterns in infant variables may benefit from these statistical approaches.     

Two-month-olds' attention and affective response to maternal still face: a comparison between term and preterm infants in Taiwan

Maternal still face is a robust experimental procedure designed to examine infants’ sensitivity to social contingency and reactivity to its violation. To extend earlier research on the still-face effect on term infants in Western cultures, the present study compared Taiwanese term and preterm infants’ attention and affective response to and recovery from a modified maternal still-face procedure that used an additional still-face reengagement sequence at 2 months of age (corrected age for preterm infants). Infants’ gaze and facial affect were coded from videos. Results showed that preterm infants were as sensitive as term infants to the interruption to social contingency. Both groups of infants reacted with decreased gaze and positive affect across episodes, together with a decreased latency to gaze aversion and an increased latency to positive affect. Both term and preterm infants also demonstrated a W-shaped pattern of decline-followed-by-recovery in their latency to negative affect. However, compared to term infants, preterm infants became distressed faster and stayed in a negative affective state longer after the first exposure to maternal still face. Effects of prematurity on infant attention and affect regulation were discussed. Implications of preterm infants’ heightened affective negativity to mild stress for intervention studies were also addressed.