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Published in final edited form as: Emotion. 2022 Oct 6;23(5):1506–1512. doi: 10.1037/emo0001125

Maternal recognition of positive emotion predicts sensitive parenting in infancy

Jessica A Stern 1, Caroline M Kelsey 1,2,3, Kathleen M Krol 1, Tobias Grossmann 1
PMCID: PMC10076440  NIHMSID: NIHMS1844488  PMID: 36201795

Abstract

Research on parent-child relationships demonstrates the importance of maternal sensitivity for the development of children’s emotion regulation, social competence, and health; thus, it is important to understand the emotional-cognitive capacities underlying maternal sensitivity. We followed 120 mothers and their full-term infants from the newborn period to 5 months postpartum. Mothers’ emotion recognition during the newborn period was measured using a validated facial emotion recognition task assessing discrimination (d’) of six facial expressions of emotion: happiness, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and neutrality. Maternal behavior at 5 months postpartum was coded from a mother–infant free-play session using Ainsworth’s Sensitivity Scales. Pre-registered analyses revealed that mothers’ ability to detect happiness specifically (but not other emotions such as fear or sadness) in the neonatal period predicted greater observed sensitivity four months later, β= .30, p= .002, ΔR2= .08. Results suggest that maternal recognition of positive emotion may be uniquely predictive of sensitive behavior in parent–infant interactions.

Keywords: parenting, emotion recognition, positive affect, sensitivity, infancy

Maternal sensitivity is a robust predictor of child emotion regulation, social competence, and health in early development (Deans, 2020; Stern et al., 2020). Moreover, mothers’ emotion recognition—the ability to correctly identify emotional facial expressions—may be important for responding sensitively to children’s signals (Ainsworth, 1969). Evidence shows that parents’ empathy and emotion understanding predict adaptive parenting and secure child attachment (Borelli et al., 2020; Stern et al., 2015); further, mothers’ differential neural responding to positive vs. negative emotions has been linked to sensitive caregiving (e.g., Bernard et al., 2015). Yet little research has examined whether and how mothers’ recognition of specific emotions predicts sensitive behavior, particularly in the first months postpartum. The present study examines mothers’ ability to recognize six distinct emotions—happiness, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and neutrality—and their sensitive parenting observed at 5 months of age.

Previous research suggests that maternal behaviors such as physical touch and breastfeeding in infancy are uniquely associated with mothers’ recognition of happiness (Krol et al., 2014). Conversely, atypical processing of happiness has been observed among mothers with symptoms of anxiety and depression, as well as abusive mothers (Franklin & Volk, 2018). At the biological level, researchers have proposed that oxytocin, a neurohormone implicated in maternal care, may facilitate sensitive and cooperative behavior by increasing the salience of positive emotional cues (Domes et al., 2013; Marsh et al., 2010). Mothers’ recognition of such positive cues may be particularly important in the first months postpartum, as human infants show social smiles by 2 months, and laughter by 4 months of age, much earlier than our close primate relative, the chimpanzee (Grossmann, 2021). Importantly, infant smiling has been shown to elicit positive reactions from caregivers that help build attachment relationships (Bowlby, 1969/1982; Franklin & Volk, 2018).

A separate literature suggests that children and adults’ ability to identify distress (i.e., fear) is uniquely associated with prosocial behaviors (Grossmann et al., 2018), which may include sensitive caregiving. For example, neuroimaging research shows that adults’ enhanced amygdala responses to fearful faces predict altruistic behavior, whereas reduced responsiveness to fear is associated with psychopathic traits (Marsh et al., 2007, 2016). Among mothers specifically, accurate detection of infant distress during the prenatal period prospectively predicts mothers’ sensitivity toward their own infants at 6 months postpartum (Leerkes et al., 2010). In contrast, there is little evidence to suggest that recognition of other emotions (e.g., anger, disgust) would be linked to sensitive caregiving.

Thus, we expected that mothers’ ability to recognize specific emotional cues would be associated with sensitive behavior toward their infants. We focus on caregiving processes in the first five months of life because it is a sensitive period of infant development, during which caregiving quality has lasting impacts on the brain and behavior (Curley & Champagne, 2016; Krol et al., 2019). Further, sensitive caregiving in these first months of life has been identified as a key predictor of children’s attachment to caregivers at 12 months of age (Ainsworth et al., 1978). Though multiple caregivers are typically involved in childrearing, we focus on mothers because (a) previous work suggests that changes on the oxytocin system that occur specifically during the transition to motherhood have been linked to recognition of happiness (Krol et al., 2014), and (b) anthropological data show that in early infancy, the majority of direct caregiving is still typically provided by mothers across cultures, with direct caregiving by fathers and other caregivers increasing later in development (Konner, 2018). In pre-registered hypotheses, we predicted that mothers’ recognition of happiness and fear (operationalized as d’ scores from signal detection theory; Stanislaw & Todorov, 1999) would positively predict observed sensitivity.

Method

Participants and Procedures

Study procedures were approved by the university’s ethics board (University of Virginia IRB-HSR protocol #20381). Mothers and their full-term infants (N= 121) were recruited from a local hospital (for details see Kelsey et al., 2021a). Mothers (Mage= 31.73, SD= 4.59) identified their race (84.3% White, 9.1% Black, 3.3% Asian, 3.3% multiracial or another race) and ethnicity (2.5% Hispanic/Latina). Median family income was $60,001–$75,000; 62.8% of mothers had a Bachelor’s or Graduate Degree. The majority of mothers (77%) were married, and 97% of families reported fathers’ involvement in infants’ care.

Participants came to the lab during the newborn period (Mage= 31.81 days postpartum), when mothers completed an emotion recognition task. Of the 121 mothers who participated in the newborn visit, 109 returned around 5 months postpartum (90% retention), when caregiving behavior was observed in a mother–infant free-play session. Mothers who remained in the study did not differ significantly from those who dropped out on baseline characteristics.

Measures

Emotion recognition.

Facial emotion recognition was assessed using the Dynamic Emotional Expression Recognition Task (DEER-T; Platt et al., 2010). Color photographs of 12 actors (50% female) from the NimStim facial affect stimulus set (Tottenham et al., 2009) were used to create 3s video morphs, in which the actors’ facial expression changed from neutral (with mouth closed) to one of six dynamic expressions: fear, sadness, anger, disgust, happiness, or another neutral face (with mouth open) (Figure 1A). Although hypotheses focused on happiness and fear specifically, we included all six emotions (a) so that the task could be administered in its standardized, validated form, allowing direct comparison to previous research using this measure; and (b) so that the task was sufficiently challenging (because participants had to differentiate between a wide range of human emotions) to obtain good variability in performance. A strength of the paradigm is the inclusion of neutrality as a control against which performance on specific emotions can be compared. Faces were forward-facing, with direct gaze at the participant. Mothers were instructed to quickly and accurately identify the target emotion using labeled response keys. Each trial comprised a black fixation cross centered on a white screen lasting 1000ms, followed by a face video. Trials were terminated when participants selected a response; if no response was made after 3000ms, the feedback “TOO SLOW” appeared for 2000ms, followed by the fixation cross for the subsequent trial. Following 12 practice trials (each emotion displayed twice), mothers completed two blocks of 72 trials (144 total trials; 24 presentations of each emotion); correct/incorrect feedback was provided only for the practice trials.

Figure 1. Panel A: Example Stimuli on the Emotion Recognition Task, Displaying a Neutral-to-Happy Face Morph. Panel B:Mothers’ Discrimination (d’) of Happy Faces During the Newborn Period Uniquely Predicts Observed Sensitive Caregiving at 5 Months Postpartum.

Figure 1

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Note. s = seconds, d’ = discrimination index. Plotted is the partial regression plot from Model 1 (N= 120). Solid black line indicates the beta coefficient, controlling for infant negative mood and mothers’ performance (d’) on neutral face trials (b= 1.63, p= .003); gray ribbon illustrates 95% CI. Photographs are from the NimStim Face Stimulus Set (Model #01). Development of the MacBrain Face Stimulus Set was overseen by Nim Tottenham and supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Early Experience and Brain Development (http://www.macbrain.org/resources.htm).

Correct responses (hits), falsely identified emotions (false alarms), and reaction times (RTs) were recorded for all trials. Emotion detection (d’) is estimated for each of the six target emotion using the formula: d’= Z(hit rate) – Z(false alarm rate). We focus on this performance index to operationalize emotion recognition in the present study (Stanislaw & Todorov, 1999).

Maternal sensitivity.

Mothers were invited into a laboratory playroom, and infants were placed on their backs on a blanket at the center of the room, following procedures by Grossmann et al. (2018). Two cameras recorded the interaction simultaneously: one captured the mother’s face and body, and the other captured the infant’s. The same set of objects (toys and a book) was provided for each dyad. Participants could freely choose which object(s) they engaged with, if any. An experimenter instructed mothers to “play with your child as you normally would” for 5 minutes; then the experimenter left the room for the duration of the session.

Video-recordings were coded by a team of four coders trained to use Ainsworth’s (1967) gold-standard Sensitivity Scales; we chose the two most widely-used scales, sensitivity vs. insensitivity to infant signals and cooperation vs. interference with infant’s ongoing activity. All videos were coded by two independent raters, and discrepancies were resolved via conferencing. Krippendorff’s alpha (Hayes & Krippendorff, 2007) indicated good interrater reliability for sensitivity and cooperation (K-alphas= .70, .75, respectively). Given the high correlation (r ~.80) typically observed between the sensitivity and cooperation scales, we averaged these scores for analysis, following previous work (e.g., Stern et al., 2020).

As a potential covariate, infant negative mood was also coded from these videos on a 7-point scale from 1 (content, no negative affect) to 7 (strong negative affect) using the Observational Record of the Caregiving Environment (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 1996). Interrater reliability was excellent, K-alpha= .82.

Analytic Plan

Hypotheses and statistical analyses were pre-registered (https://osf.io/fa7wm). First, we examined zero-order correlations between emotion d’ scores and maternal sensitivity. Second, to test focal hypotheses, we ran two linear regressions in MPlus version 7, predicting maternal sensitivity while controlling for two potential confounds: infant negative mood and mothers’ performance (d’) on neutral face trials. Model 1 included covariates in Step 1 and Happy d’ scores in Step 2. Model 2 included covariates in Step 1 and Fear d’ scores in Step 2. Predictors were allowed to covary. Data and statistical code are available upon request from the first author.

Missing Data.

Seven participants did not complete the emotion recognition task and three were missing free-play videos. To handle missing data, we used full information maximum likelihood (FIML) estimation, which yields least-biased estimates when all available data are used for longitudinal analyses (Mueller & Hancock, 2010). Thus, the final analytic sample was N= 120. Power analysis in G*Power indicated that this sample size was sufficient to detect small-to-moderate linear effect sizes (f2≥ .066) at standard α= .05 with .80 power.

Results

Descriptive statistics and zero-order correlations are displayed in Table 1. Maternal sensitivity was significantly associated with recognition of happiness, r= .28, p= .005, but not fear, r= . 14, p= .162, nor other emotions, rs≈ 0. Infant negative mood was unrelated to maternal sensitivity. Sensitivity, happiness d’ scores, and fear d’ scores did not differ by mothers’ racial-ethnic identity (see Supplemental Materials).

Table 1.

Descriptive Statistics and Bivariate Correlations Among Study Variables.

Maternal sensitivity Infant negative mood Happiness d’ Fear d’ Sadness d’ Anger d’ Disgust d’ Neutrality d’
Maternal sensitivity -
Infant negative mood −.10 -
Happiness d’ .28** −.09 -
Fear d’ .14 .05 .16 -
Sadness d’ −.08 .09 .24* .31** -
Anger d’ −.01 −.09 .26** .32** .32** -
Disgust d’ .09 −.03 .23* .34** .51** .59** -
Neutrality d’ −.00 .00 .31** .16 .51** .30** .37** -
  N 106 106 113 113 113 113 113 113
  M 6.07 2.08 3.93 2.66 2.38 2.75 2.06 3.05
  SD 1.82 1.35 .33 0.74 0.54 0.65 0.66 0.72
  Range 1.25 – 9.00 1.00 – 7.00 2.80 – 4.17 .38 – 4.17 .88 – 3.74 .71 – 4.17 .63 – 3.51 .20 – 4.17
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Note. Maternal emotion recognition was assessed during the newborn period; d’ scores were calculated as Z(hit rate) – Z(false alarm rate) for each emotion. Maternal sensitivity = mean of scores for Ainsworth’s sensitivity–insensitivity and cooperation–interference scales coded from the mother–infant free play session at 5 months postpartum.

*

p < .05

**

p < .01, two-tailed.

Regression models for focal hypotheses regarding happiness and fear are reported in Table 2. In Model 1 controlling for covariates, mothers’ recognition of happiness predicted greater maternal sensitivity, consistent with our first hypothesis (Figure 1B). In Model 2, however, recognition of fear did not significantly predict maternal sensitivity, contrary to our second hypothesis. (For completeness, regression models for the non-focal emotions are reported in Supplemental Materials, as well as bivariate correlations with reaction times.)

Table 2.

Full regression results for focal hypotheses (N= 120). Maternal recognition of happiness (Model 1), but not fear (Model 2) predicted observed sensitive caregiving, controlling for a priori covariates.

β p ΔR2
Model 1 Happiness
Step 1 Infant negative mood → Sensitivity −.14 .295 .01
Neutral d’ → Sensitivity −.00 .994
Step 2 Happy d’ → Sensitivity .30 .002 .08
Infant negative mood with Neutral d’ .00 .991
Infant negative mood with Happy d’ −.08 .401
Neutral d’ with Happy d’ .31 <.001
Model 2 Fear
Step 1 Infant negative mood → Sensitivity −.14 .295 .01
Neutral d’ → Sensitivity −.00 .994
Step 2 Fear d’ → Sensitivity .15 .123 .02
Infant negative mood with Neutral d’ .00 .966
Infant negative mood with Fear d’ .06 .575
Neutral d’ with Fear d’ .16 .080
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Note. Models were run in two steps in MPlus Version 7 using FIML. Boldface indicates significant coefficients. Mothers’ performance on the emotion recognition task was measured during the newborn period; d’ scores were calculated as Z(hit rate) – Z(false alarm rate) for each emotion. Maternal sensitivity = mean of scores for Ainsworth’s (1969) sensitivity–insensitivity and cooperation–interference scales, coded from video recordings of the mother–infant free play session at 5 months postpartum.

Although residuals were normally distributed (meeting assumptions for linear regression), happy d’ scores showed a ceiling effect; thus, as a robustness check, we conducted an additional test of Model 1 using a median split of happy d’ scores (note that this was a data-driven decision and not part of the original pre-registration). Mothers who scored at or above the median for happiness recognition showed higher sensitivity (M= 6.43, SD= 1.57, bootstrapped 95% CI [6.01, 6.82], in the “sensitive” range), compared to mothers below the median (M= 5.40, SD= 2.04, bootstrapped 95% CI [4.72, 6.10], in the “inconsistently sensitive” range). This difference was significant, t= 2.65, p= .010, Cohen’s d= 0.58, a medium effect size.

Post hoc analyses

To better understand the unique associations between mothers’ recognition of happiness and sensitive caregiving, we examined whether mothers who recognized others’ positive affect on the DEER-T might also express greater positive affect during interactions with their infants, given that “mutual delight” is often a characteristic of securely attached mother–infant dyads (Ainsworth, 1967). In post-hoc analyses, an independent coder (who was unaware of all information regarding maternal sensitivity) rated mothers’ expressions of positive affect during free-play — including smiling, laughter, and positive vocalizations — on a scale from 1 (little to no positive affect) to 3 (high positive affect). Expressions of maternal negative affect were infrequent and typically fleeting.

At the bivariate level, mothers’ recognition of happiness during the newborn period was indeed associated with higher positive affect expressed at 5m, but this trend did not reach significance, r= .20, p= .055. However, mothers’ positive affect was not concurrently related to sensitivity coded within the same parent–child interactions, r= .08, p= .424, suggesting that these are distinct constructs. In a follow-up path model, we examined mothers’ positive affect as a potential explanatory factor in the link between happiness recognition and sensitive caregiving, controlling for the same set of covariates. Recognition of happiness did not predict its expression four months later, b= 28.95, p= .166, nor did positive affect show any relation to sensitivity, b= .00, p= .985. Thus, the indirect effect was not supported, b= .05, p= .352, but the direct link between recognition of happiness and sensitivity remained significant, b= 1.667, p= .015.

Discussion

Sensitive caregiving in the first months of life is a key predictor of healthy child development (Deans, 2020). The present study sheds light on the cognitive-emotional abilities that predict sensitive caregiving in a community sample of mothers observed over the first five months postpartum. We find that mothers’ ability to detect happiness during the newborn period uniquely and positively predicts sensitive responding to their infant 5 months later, consistent with hypotheses. Functionally, happiness is thought to serve as an affiliation cue, which may attune mothers to positive social stimuli, including (a) positive signaling behaviors (i.e., smiling) from their infant that facilitate bonding (Bowlby, 1969/1982; Krol et al., 2014), as well as (b) affiliative cues from other adults who may serve as resources for cooperative caregiving and social support during the neonatal period (Hrdy, 2009). Research suggests multiple biological mechanisms through which both the perception of happiness and sensitive caregiving may be supported, including variability in the oxytocin system and function of the gut–brain axis (Kelsey et al., 2019; Krol et al., 2014).

It is also possible that mothers who are more attuned to happy faces are more likely to respond by expressing positive affect toward their infant (i.e., “mutual delight”; Ainsworth, 1967); however, we found only modest support for this explanation in our follow-up analyses. In the present sample, mothers’ detection of happiness during the newborn period was only marginally correlated with their observed positive affect expressed during interactions with their infant at 5m (and was unrelated when controlling for covariates). Critically, maternal detection, but not expression, of positive emotion was uniquely related to sensitive caregiving behavior. This novel finding suggests that mothers’ positive expressiveness is distinct from their ability to respond sensitively to infants’ signals. It may be that mothers’ expression of affect (positive or otherwise) must be contingent upon the infant’s emotional state in order to be sensitive and regulating (Beebe & Steele, 2017; see also Gergely, 2007 for discussion of parental affect-mirroring and “markedness”). Mothers, particularly in North American cultures, may express high levels of positive affect for reasons unrelated to the infant’s emotional needs (e.g., a desire to appear favorably to researchers; cultural norms regarding what a “good mother” and a “happy baby” look like). Micro-analysis of parent–infant face-to-face interactions (Beebe & Steele, 2017) may uncover how mothers’ perception of infants’ moment-to-moment changes in positive affect, as well as mothers’ contingent responses to infants’ emotions, shape everyday caregiving through experiences of social reward and adaptive co-regulation of emotion (see also Franklin & Volk, 2018; Grossmann, 2021).

Contrary to predictions, mothers’ discrimination of fear was not significantly related to sensitive caregiving behavior, contrasting with previous research linking detection of fear/distress cues to prosocial behaviors (Grossmann et al., 2018; Marsh, 2016). One possibility is that predictors of sensitive parenting differ from predictors of non-parental care. A second explanation is sample size: the observed non-significant coefficient for fear detection was positive, but the effect size was small and might only be detected with substantially greater statistical power (N = 395, according to power analysis). A final possibility relates to developmental timing: for example, mothers’ detection of affiliative cues may be more important in the early stages of infant development for forging an attachment bond, whereas detection of distress may become increasingly important later in development, as infants become more mobile and active in exploring a potentially dangerous environment.

Study Strengths, Limitations, & Future Directions

Strengths of the study include the use of a validated task to measure emotion recognition from dynamic affective cues, the inclusion of neutral faces as a conservative control, and the observational assessment of maternal sensitivity with Ainsworth’s gold-standard coding system. It is also notable that results regarding happiness remained significant even after controlling for infant negative mood, and remained so when mothers’ expression of positive affect was incorporated into the model.

However, the generalizability of the findings is limited by the Western, educated, relatively upper-SES sample of mothers, highlighting the importance of replicating findings with other caregivers (e.g., fathers; Cowan & Cowan, 2019) and in other cultures and contexts. This is particularly important, given potential biases in emotion perception tasks developed in Western laboratories (see Supplemental Materials for analysis and discussion in the present sample). We underscore the importance of including greater racial and cultural diversity in both (a) future samples of parents and children, and (b) representation in task stimuli, echoing recent calls for anti-racist perspectives in attachment research (Stern et al., 2021). Additionally, although we included important covariates, maternal depressive symptoms are an additional potential confound that may underlie both happiness recognition and sensitive caregiving (we intend to explore this further in future studies). Finally, mothers’ emotion recognition was assessed with respect to adult strangers’ faces, and we cannot infer that their performance on this task generalizes to infants. Interestingly, some data suggest that mothers, compared to non-mothers, show enhanced recognition of emotions in adult faces (Matsunaga et al., 2018), suggesting that recognizing emotions in other adults may be relevant to the caregiving system. Future work should examine the extent to which emotion recognition on the DEER-T generalizes to infant faces, and whether recognition of adult vs. infant faces is a stronger predictor of caregiving behavior.

Future research should examine whether individual differences in infant positive affect (e.g., social smiles) may elicit both mothers’ sensitivity to positive affect and sensitive caregiving to test potential child-driven or bidirectional effects (Paschall & Mastergeorge, 2016). Relatedly, it is possible that mothers’ caregiving experiences also inform their perception of emotion (Matsunaga et al., 2018). Additionally, future work should examine whether mothers’ discrimination of negative emotions may be important for other dimensions of parenting (e.g., sensitivity to infant distress specifically), in clinical samples of mothers, or for predicting maternal sensitivity in later periods of infant development, as infants gain a wider repertoire of social-emotional cues to elicit responses from caregivers. Further, future research should examine the role of maternal neurobiological factors, such as oxytocin and neural sensitivity to emotion expressions of both infants and adults, in explaining the observed link between happiness recognition and sensitive caregiving (Krol et al., 2014). Finally, given the crucial importance of fathers and alloparental care in childrearing (e.g., Bakermans-Kranenburg et al., 2019), future research should examine whether there are similar vs. unique emotion-related predictors of sensitive caregiving in fathers, grandparents, extended family, and non-kin.

Conclusions

The present study is first to examine links between observed sensitive caregiving behavior and recognition of six distinct emotions in a community sample over the first months of motherhood. During the newborn period, mothers’ recognition of positive emotion—i.e., happy facial expressions—appears to be particularly important for predicting sensitive caregiving. In contrast, discrimination of negative emotions—such as fear, anger, sadness, and disgust—was a less salient predictor of sensitivity during this period. Findings have implications for parenting interventions and provide support for programs that target caregivers’ emotional competencies (e.g., Bernard et al., 2015), including the ability to recognize happiness in others.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental Material

Acknowledgments:

We thank the families who participated in this research, and the research assistants who helped collect the data: Sarah Thomas, Christina Marlow, Kate Haynes, Carolynn McElroy, Julia Larsen, Heath Yancey, Sujal Sigdel, and Shefalika Prasad. We also thank our behavioral coding team: Sydney Lear, Bridget Nortey, Ponni Velmurugan, Evelyn Garcia, Hannah Hardiman, Cat Thrasher, and expert coder Dr. Roseriet Beijers.

Funding:

This research was supported by Danone North America, Gut Microbiome, Yogurt and Probiotics Fellowship Grant; UVA Data Science Fellowship; and Jefferson Scholars Foundation (CK); the National Science Foundation Award #2017229 and UVA Brain Institute Seed fund (TG); as well as a Transformative Neurodevelopment Pilot Grant from the UVA Brain Institute and Baby Brain Initiative (JS and TG). Manuscript preparation was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number F32HD102119 (JS) and a Hartwell Biomedical Research Fellowship (KK). The content does not represent the official views of NSF or NIH.

Footnotes

The authors declare no conflicts of interest. Study hypotheses and analyses were pre-registered (https://osf.io/fa7wm). Data and statistical code are available upon request from the first author.

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