Final Report Summary - INFANT NIRS (Frontal Asymmetry as an Endophenotypic Marker of Differential Susceptibility to Parenting in Infancy: A Functional NIRS Study)
in individually tailored parenting support and interventions.
Specifically, we have tested: -mothers' sensitivity to their infants' behavior by collecting behavioral data during a free-play and a toy-interaction session and -frontal asymmetries in infants' neurophysiological responses to speech spoken with happy vs. angry prosody We then proceeded to correlate these measures.
A total of 43 mother-infant pairs participated in the study. Complete datasets (i.e. all measurements are of sufficient quality) are available for 22 pairs.
Analyses evaluating the primary hypothesis that infants’ baseline frontal asymmetry would moderate the effect of maternal behavior on infants’ neural responses to infant directed speech show that infants whose mothers show less intrusive (more positive) behavior during play have a larger positivity in their ERPs in response to happy compared to angry words, likely reflecting greater resource allocation to happy than angry prosody. This result is in accordance with our expectations. However, there was no evidence for moderation of this effect by infants’ frontal asymmetry. Thus these results are not in accordance with differential susceptibility theory.