Variable- and person-centered approaches to affect-biased attention in infancy reveal unique relations with infant negative affect and maternal anxiety

Abstract

Affect-biased attention is an automatic process that prioritizes emotionally or motivationally salient stimuli. Several models of affect-biased attention and its development suggest that it comprises an individual's ability to both engage with and disengage from emotional stimuli. Researchers typically rely on singular tasks to measure affect-biased attention, which may lead to inconsistent results across studies. Here we examined affect-biased attention across three tasks in a unique sample of 193 infants, using both variable-centered (factor analysis; FA) and person-centered (latent profile analysis; LPA) approaches. Using exploratory FA, we found evidence for two factors of affect-biased attention: an Engagement factor and a Disengagement factor, where greater maternal anxiety was related to less engagement with faces. Using LPA, we found two groups of infants with different patterns of affect-biased attention: a Vigilant group and an Avoidant group. A significant interaction noted that infants higher in negative affect who also had more anxious mothers were most likely to be in the Vigilant group. Overall, these results suggest that both FA and LPA are viable approaches for studying distinct questions related to the development of affect-biased attention, and set the stage for future longitudinal work examining the role of infant negative affect and maternal anxiety in the emergence of affect-biased attention.

Figure 1

Correlations between eye-tracking metrics of interest. DP dot probe task, OV overlap task, VI vigilance task, A angry face, H happy face, AP probe associated with angry face, HP probe associated with happy face.

Figure 2

Regions of significance figure probing the moderating role of maternal anxiety on the relation between negative affect and probability of vigilant group membership. The dashed vertical line indicates the point at which the relation becomes significant. The dark horizontal bar represents our observed range of maternal anxiety scores. Results suggest that at higher levels of maternal anxiety and negative affect infants have a higher probability of being in the vigilant group.