CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 194Child and Animal Learning DevelopmentChild and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional DevelopmentInfant Health and Development

Infant response to the still-face situation at 3 and 6 months

Toda, Sueko, Fogel, Alan·1993·Developmental Psychology
DOI 10.1037/0012-1649.29.3.532
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

To investigate developmental changes in infant responses to the mother's still face (SF), we ob-served 37 mother-infant dyads in the laboratory when infants were 3 and 6 months old. Infantsreduced their smiling and increased their gazing away from mother during the SF at both 3 and 6months. Compared with 3-month-olds, 6-month-olds were more likely to use directed hand activi-ties while gazing away from mother. Results suggest that developmental changes in gaze and motoractivity are incorporated into the infant's response to a stressful situation.The still-face situation, in which mothers freeze their faceand stop talking to their infants, has been used by a number ofinvestigators to study the effect of alterations in maternal emo-tional expressions on infant behavior (Cohn & Elmore, 1988;Field, Vega-Lahr, Scafidi, & Goldstein, 1986; Fogel, Diamond,Langhorst, & Demos, 1982; Gusella, Muir, & Tronick, 1988;Mayes & Carter, 1990; Murray & Trevarthen, 1985; Stack M Stoller & Field, 1982; Tronick, Als, Adamson,Wise, & Brazelton, 1978). A consistent finding across thesestudies is that when mothers pose the still-face expression fol-lowing a baseline period of spontaneous face-to-face interac-tion, 3-month-old infants show an increase of gazing away fromthe mother's face, changes in heart rate indicating increasedarousal, and a decrease of smiling. Relatively few infants fuss orcry if the still face lasts no more than 2 or 3 min, althoughcrying has been observed during a resumed normal interactioncondition following the still-face condition (Fogel et al., 1982).These results suggest that a short-term maternal still face has asobering or mildly stressful effect on young infants.The still-face effect has been shown to be caused by the ces-sation of maternal movement and expressiveness in the contextof prior continuous maternal activity. The response to the stillface is clearly different from other types of interruption of in-teraction, such as when the mother turns her head to talk to theexperimenter (Murray & Trevarthen, 1985), or from the motherleaving the room (Field etal., 1986; Fogel, 1980). Using a video-taped image of the mother, Gusella et al. (1988) presented in-fants with the following conditions: a still face plus interactivevoice of the mother, a no-voice interactive face, and a no-voicestill face. The still face, with or without the voice, had the sameeffect as in the live still-face situation, whereas the interactiveface without the voice did not produce a typical still-face effect.Finally, Gusella et al. (1988) compared infants who experienceda normal/still face/normal sequence of conditions with infantswho experienced a-normal/normal/normal sequence. The in-Sueko Toda, Department of Psychology, Shirayuri College, Tokyo,Japan; Alan Fogel, Department of Psychology, University of Utah.We thank P. W Berman and M. H. Bornstein for comments.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed toSueko Toda, Shirayuri College, 5-7-48-202, Oshitate-cho, Fuchu-shi,Tokyo 183, Japan, or to Alan Fogel, Department of Psychology, Univer-sity of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112.fants who experienced the still face behaved significantly dif-ferently in th e secon d an thir conditions of sequenccompared with infants who had three normal interactions in arow. The still-face effect, therefore, is not due to maternal si-lence, to the order of presentation, or to elapsed time.The study by Gusella et al. (1988) is one of the few to reportinfants' responses to the still face at any age other than 3months. Their study compared infants at 3 and 6 months. At 6months, they found identical effects for differences betweennormal and still-face conditions in the duration of gazing andsmiling that have been described for the 3-month-olds. Themain age difference was that 6-month-olds gazed away longerduring the still face than 3-month-olds, but this could be ex-plained by the normative increase reported for gaze away frommother at 6 months compared with at 3 months during thenormal spontaneous interaction (Cohn & Tronick, 1987; Kaye& Fogel, 1980).For 3-month-olds, gaze aversion from social interaction hasbeen explained as a mechanism for reducing arousal or tensionand for processing stimulation received from the social partner(Brazelton, Koslowski, & Main, 1974; Sroufe & Waters, 1977;Stern, 1977). Field (1981) found that gazing away from themother is a common strategy used to modulate arousal and toprocess information about distressing events or situations, asshown by a relation between heart rate changes and gaze aver-sion. By 6 months, gaze aversion may be related more to aredirection of infant attention, away from mother and towardphysical objects (Kaye & Fogel, 1980). Infants develop an inter-est in watching their hands and body or the external worldaround this period (Piaget, 1954), which is a period that alsocorresponds to increased use of the hands for reaching andgrasping (von Hofsten, 1979; White, Castle, & Held, 1964).D

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1037/0012-1649.29.3.532

Cites

30 of 30 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • The strongest and most replicated evidence for socially motivated behavior in infancy comes from reactions elicited by the sudden interruption in social interaction, known as the still face paradigm.

    “The strongest (and most replicated) evidence for socially motivated behavior in infancy comes from reactions elicited by the sudden interruption in social interaction, known as the still face paradigm (Toda & Fogel, 1993; Weinberg & Tronick, 1996).”

    From From early markers to neuro-developmental mechanisms of autism (2014) · cites this paper as Toda & Fogel, 1993

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Toda, S., & Fogel, A.
Affiliations
Shirayuri University (JP)
Venue
Developmental Psychology
Publisher
American Psychological Association (APA)
Published
1993-05
Volume
29
Issue
3
Pages
532-538
ISSN
  • 0012-1649 (ISSN-L)
  • 1939-0599
DOI
10.1037/0012-1649.29.3.532
OpenAlex
W2144847963
Cited by
194
References
30
Citations by year
2026: 1 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 3 · 2018: 6 · 2017: 11 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 7 · 2014: 12 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 11
FWCI
4.72
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
Developmental Psychology (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development
  • Health Sciences › Health Professions › Pharmacy › Infant Health and Development
Keywords
maternal emotional expression, gaze behavior, smiling, infant motor activity, hand activity, infant development, mother-infant interaction, infant stress, 3-month-old infants, 6-month-old infants, infant emotional development, infant motor development, infant social development, infant cognitive development, infant language development

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review