Fear in infancy: Lessons from snakes, spiders, heights, and strangers

An examination of measures of young children's interest in natural object categories

Developmental research utilizes various different methodologies and measures to study the cognitive development of young children; however, the reliability and validity of such measures have been a critical issue in all areas of research practices. To address this problem, particularly in the area of research on infants' interests, we examined the convergent validity of previously reported measures of children's interests in natural object categories, as indexed by (1) parents' estimation of their child's interest in the categories, (2) extrinsic (overt choices in a task), (3) intrinsic (looking time toward objects), and (4) physiological (pupil dilation) responses to objects of different categories. Additionally, we also examined the discriminant validity of all the aforementioned measures against the well-established and validated measure of parents' estimations of children's vocabulary knowledge. Children completed two tasks: (a) an eye-tracking task, where they were presented with images from a range of defined categories, which collected indices of looking time and pupillary activity; (b) a sticker-choice task, where they were asked to choose between two sticker-images from two different categories belonging to the range of categories assessed in the previous task. Parents completed two questionnaires to estimate (i) their child's interests and (ii) vocabulary knowledge in the categories presented. We first analyzed the discriminant validity between the two parent measures, and found a significant positive association between them. Our successive analyses showed no strong or significant associations between any of our measures, apart from a significant positive association between children's looking time and parents' estimations of children's vocabulary knowledge. From our findings, we conclude that measures of infants' interests thus far may not have sufficient reliability to adequately capture any potential relationship between these measures, or index different components of interest in young children. We suggest next steps for further validation studies in infant research.

Effects of parental holding on pain response in young children during cystometry: A randomized controlled trial

INTRODUCTION

Cystometry is essential for evaluating bladder function. However, children may react negatively to the physical pain of urethral catheterization or anxiety and fear of an unfamiliar environment. These pain responses during the cystometry procedure may interfere with the cystometry procedure and make it difficult to interpret the cystometry result. In this regard, the International Children's Continence Society has advised performing cystometry while holding infants as an effective nonpharmacological pain management method, but there is insufficient evidence to support this.

PURPOSE

This study aimed to analyze the effect of parental holding on reducing pain in children during cystometry.

METHODS

This was an experimental study in a randomized controlled pre-post test design. A total of 64 participants aged 6-18 months were recruited. During cystometry, the participants in the experimental group were placed on the parent's laps and held in the parents' arms. The participants in the control group were laid down on the examination table. During the procedure, both groups of parents were allowed to touch their children in all ways except holding them and to use the pacifier if they wished. The behavioral (face, leg, activity, cry, consolability scale) and physiological (oxygen saturation and heart rate) pain responses were measured at three-time points (immediately, 3, and 10 min after urethral catheter insertion).

RESULTS

Comparing the two groups, in the experimental group, the behavioral pain response at 3 min after urethral catheter insertion (t = -2.165, p = 0.034) and 10 min after (t = -3.155, p = 0.002) was decreased compared with that immediately after urethral catheter insertion. In addition, oxygen saturation increased more (t = 2.021, p = 0.048), and the heart rate decreased more (t = -2.033, p = 0.047) at 10 min than at 3 min after urethral catheter insertion in the experimental group.

CONCLUSIONS

This study revealed that parental holding could reduce pain responses during cystometry in children. Further research is required to confirm the applicability and usefulness of parental holding during cystometry.

Rapid withdrawal from a threatening animal is movement-specific and mediated by reflex-like neural processing

Responses to potentially dangerous stimuli are among the most basic animal behaviors. While research has shown that threats automatically capture the attention of human participants, research has failed to demonstrate automatic behavioral responses to threats in humans. Using a novel naturalistic paradigm, we show that two species of animals humans often report fearing trigger rapid withdrawal responses: participants withdrew their arm from photos of snakes and spiders faster, and with higher acceleration when compared to bird and butterfly stimuli. The behavior was specific to withdrawal as approach movements or button-press/release tasks failed to detect a similar difference. Moreover, between-participant differences in how aversive they found the stimuli predicted the participant's withdrawal speed, indicating that the paradigm was also sensitive to trait-level differences between individuals. Using electroencephalography (EEG), we show that the fast withdrawal was mediated by two attentional processes. First, fast withdrawal responses were associated with early amplification of sensory signals (40-110 ms after stimulus). Second, a later correlate of feature-based attention (early posterior negativity, EPN, 200-240 ms after stimulus) revealed the opposite pattern: Stronger EPN was associated with slower behavioral responses, suggesting that the deployment of attention towards the threatening stimulus features, or failure to "disengage" attention from the stimulus, was detrimental for withdrawal speed. Altogether, the results suggest that rapid behavioral withdrawal from a threatening animal is mediated by reflex-like attentional processing, and later, conscious attention to stimulus features may hinder escaping the treat.

Parent to Offspring Fear Transmission via Modeling in Early Life: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Infants can acquire fears vicariously by observing parents' fearful reactions to novel stimuli in everyday situations (i.e., modeling). To date, no systematic or meta-analytic review examined the role of modeling in parent-child transmission of fear and avoidance in early life. In our systematic review and meta-analysis, we aimed to investigate the effect of modeling parents' fearful reactions on infants' acquisition of fear and avoidance of novel stimuli and explore the moderation of this effect by child behavioral inhibition (BI) and parent trait anxiety. The search conducted in Web Of Science, Pubmed, Embase, and PsycINFO revealed 23 eligible studies for the systematic review and 19 for the meta-analysis. Eligible studies included published studies that measured infant fear and avoidance (infants aged up to 30 months) of novel stimuli following exposure to parental fearful expressions. Meta-analysis findings revealed a significant causal effect of modeling of parental fear on infants' fear [g = .44] and avoidance of novel stimuli [g = .44]. The findings support moderation by child BI on infant avoidance (not fear) acquisition, with the effects being larger for infants with higher BI. However, this moderation was only found, when including both experimental and correlational studies (p > .05), but not when exclusively including experimental studies (p = .17). This meta-analysis provides support for early parent-to-offspring fear transmission: a causal small to medium effect of parents' fearful reactions was shown on infants' fear and avoidance of novel stimuli. Elucidating parent-to-offspring anxiety transmission pathways can inform us about potential fear reduction and prevention strategies.

Beyond Nature Versus Nurture: the Emergence of Emotion

Affective science is stuck in a version of the nature-versus-nurture debate, with theorists arguing whether emotions are evolved adaptations or psychological constructions. We do not see these as mutually exclusive options. Many adaptive behaviors that humans have evolved to be good at, such as walking, emerge during development - not according to a genetically dictated program, but through interactions between the affordances of the body, brain, and environment. We suggest emotions are the same. As developing humans acquire increasingly complex goals and learn optimal strategies for pursuing those goals, they are inevitably pulled to particular brain-body-behavior states that maximize outcomes and self-reinforce via positive feedback loops. We call these recurring, self-organized states emotions. Emotions display many of the hallmark features of self-organized attractor states, such as hysteresis (prior events influence the current state), degeneracy (many configurations of the underlying variables can produce the same global state), and stability. Because most bodily, neural, and environmental affordances are shared by all humans - we all have cardiovascular systems, cerebral cortices, and caregivers who raised us - similar emotion states emerge in all of us. This perspective helps reconcile ideas that, at first glance, seem contradictory, such as emotion universality and neural degeneracy.

Differences in cognitive processing between snakes and guns: Evidence from electroencephalography

The aim of the study is to explore differences in cognitive processing of phylogenetic and ontogenetic stimulus using the electroencephalography (EEG) technology. The researcher chose snakes and guns as representatives of phylogenetic stimulus and ontogenetic stimulus, respectively, and used the Oddball paradigm to present the experimental stimuli and explore the cognitive processing differences between them through time-domain analysis and time-frequency analysis. The results of time-domain analysis showed that snakes elicited larger N1, P2, and P3 amplitudes and a shorter P3 latency than guns and neutral stimuli, and that guns elicited greater P2 and P3 amplitudes than neutral stimuli. The findings of time-frequency analysis showed that the beta-band (320 - 420 ms, 25 - 35 Hz) power elicited by snakes was significantly greater than by guns and neutral stimuli, and that the beta-band power elicited by guns was significantly greater than by neutral stimuli. The results indicated that the brain has a cognitive processing advantage for both snakes and guns, which is more obvious for snakes than for guns, and that the brain is more sensitive to snakes.

An ethologically based view into human fear

The quality of the defensive response to a threat depends on the elements that trigger the fear response. The current classification system of phobias does not account for this. Here, we analyze the fear-eliciting elements and discern the different types of fears that originate from them. We propose Pain, Disgust, Vasovagal response, Visual-vestibular and postural interactions, Movement and Speed, Distance and Size, Low and mid-level visual features, Smell, and Territory and social status. We subdivide phobias according to the fear-eliciting elements most frequently triggered by them and their impact on behavior. We discuss the implications of a clinical conceptualization of phobias in humans by reconsidering the current nosology. This conceptualization will facilitate finding etiological factors in defensive behavior expression, fine-tuning exposure techniques, and challenging preconceived notions of preparedness. This approach to phobias leads to surprising discoveries and shows how specific responses bear little relation to the interpretation we might later give to them. Dividing fears into their potentially fear-eliciting elements can also help in applying the research principles formulated by the Research Domain Criteria initiative.

Infant temperamental fear, pupil dilation, and gaze aversion from smiling strangers

In childhood, higher levels of temperamental fear-an early-emerging proclivity to distress in the face of novelty-are associated with lower social responsivity and greater social anxiety. While the early emergence of temperamental fear in infancy is poorly understood, it is theorized to be driven by individual differences in reactivity and self-regulation to novel stimuli. The current study used eye tracking to capture infants' (N = 124) reactions to a video of a smiling stranger-a common social encounter-including infant gaze aversions from the stranger's face (indexing arousal regulation) and pupil dilation (indexing physiological reactivity), longitudinally at 2, 4, 6, and 8 months of age. Multilevel mixed-effects models indicated that more fearful infants took more time to look away from a smiling stranger's face than less fearful infants, suggesting that high-fear infants may have slower arousal regulation. At 2 and 4 months, more fearful infants also exhibited greater and faster pupil dilation before gaze aversions, consistent with greater physiological reactivity. Together, these findings suggest that individual differences in infants' gaze aversions and pupil dilation can index the development of fearful temperament in early infancy, facilitating the identification of, and interventions for, risk factors to social disruptions.

Bi-directional relations between attention and social fear across the first two years of life

This study examined longitudinal relations between attention and social fear across the first two years of life. Our sample consisted of 357 infants and their caregivers across three sites. Data was collected at 4, 8, 12, 18, and 24 months of age. At all 5 assessments, the infants participated in 2 eye-tracking tasks (Vigilance and Overlap) which measured different components of attention bias (orientation, engagement, and disengagement), and parents completed questionnaires assessing infant temperament. For the first three assessments, social fear was measured using the Infant Behavioral Questionnaire-Revised (IBQ-R; Gartstein & Rothbart, 2003) focused on interactions with strangers, and for the final two time points, we used the social fearfulness subscale on the Toddler Behavior Assessment Questionnaire (TBAQ; Goldsmith, 1996). The results of a random intercept cross-lagged panel model showed intermittent evidence of uni-directional and reciprocal relations between attention to both threatening and positive emotion facial configurations and social fear. Our findings suggest that characteristics of behaviorally inhibited temperament-in this case, social fear-begin to interact with attention biases to emotion in the very first year of life, which carries implications for the timing of future interventions designed to mitigate the early development of maladaptive patterns of attention.

Aberrant orbitofrontal cortical activation interferes with encoding of Pavlovian fear conditioning

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients were usually found with the hyper-activation of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and a deficit in fear extinction learning. The OFC can be subdivided into the lateral OFC (lOFC) and the medial OFC (mOFC). Previous studies have suggested that both subregions are involved in the modulation of negative emotions. However, how aberrant activation of the OFC interacts with the encoding of Pavlovian fear remains unknown. In this study, the lOFC or the mOFC was pharmacologically activated or inactivated before the fear conditioning on Day 1, followed by a context test on Day 2 and a tone test on Day 3 in male Long-Evans rats. We found that for the animals that underwent fear conditioning under aberrant activation of either the lOFC or the mOFC, they showed normal within-session fear expression. However, the acquisition/consolidation of contextual fear was impaired under mOFC activation, while the acquisition/consolidation of cued fear was impaired under either the lOFC or the mOFC activation, in that these animals showed lower freezing compared to controls during the retrieval test. On the other hand, for the animals that underwent fear conditioning under inactivation of either the lOFC or the mOFC, they showed normal within-session fear expression, as well as intact encoding of both the contextual and cued fear. Together, our results suggested that the OFC was not actively engaged in the acquisition of Pavlovian fear conditioning, but aberrant activation of the OFC impaired fear learning.

Visual segmentation of complex naturalistic structures in an infant eye-tracking search task

An infant’s everyday visual environment is composed of a complex array of entities, some of which are well integrated into their surroundings. Although infants are already sensitive to some categories in their first year of life, it is not clear which visual information supports their detection of meaningful elements within naturalistic scenes. Here we investigated the impact of image characteristics on 8-month-olds’ search performance using a gaze contingent eye-tracking search task. Infants had to detect a target patch on a background image. The stimuli consisted of images taken from three categories: vegetation, non-living natural elements (e.g., stones), and manmade artifacts, for which we also assessed target background differences in lower- and higher-level visual properties. Our results showed that larger target-background differences in the statistical properties scaling invariance and entropy, and also stimulus backgrounds including low pictorial depth, predicted better detection performance. Furthermore, category membership only affected search performance if supported by luminance contrast. Data from an adult comparison group also indicated that infants’ search performance relied more on lower-order visual properties than adults. Taken together, these results suggest that infants use a combination of property- and category-related information to parse complex visual stimuli.

Social Fear in US Infants: The Roles of Hair and Salivary Cortisol

Elevated social fear in infancy poses risk for later social maladjustment and psychopathology. Hair cortisol concentration (HCC), an index of cumulative cortisol exposure, and diurnal salivary cortisol slope, a biomarker of acute stress regulation, have been associated with social fear behaviors in childhood; however, no research has addressed their relations in infancy. Elucidating potential biomarkers of infant social fear behaviors, as well as environmental factors associated with these biomarkers, may grant insights into the ontogeny of fear behaviors that increase risk for internalizing and externalizing psychopathologies later in life. The current study used multiple linear regression to examine if infant HCC, infant diurnal cortisol slope, and income-to-needs ratios (ITN) were differentially associated with observed social fear responses to a Stranger Approach task at 12 months. Using a sample of 90 infants (M _age = 12.26m, SD = 0.81m, 50% female), results indicated that increased infant HCC was associated with increased distress vocalizations during the Stranger Approach task, while steeper diurnal cortisol slope was associated with fewer distress vocalizations. Ordinary least squares path analyses did not reveal group differences between economically strained and non-strained infants in how cortisol measures and social fear responses related. Findings underscore very early psychobiological correlates of fearfulness that may increase risk for fear-related disorders and adverse mental health symptomology across childhood.

Parent-to-Child Anxiety Transmission Through Dyadic Social Dynamics: A Dynamic Developmental Model

The intergenerational transmission of psychopathology is one of the strongest known risk factors for childhood disorder and may be a malleable target for prevention and intervention. Anxious parents have distinct parenting profiles that impact socioemotional development, and these parenting effects may result in broad alterations to the biological and cognitive functioning of their children. Better understanding the functional mechanisms by which parental risk is passed on to children can provide (1) novel markers of risk for socioemotional difficulties, (2) specific targets for intervention, and (3) behavioral and biological indices of treatment response. We propose a developmental model in which dyadic social dynamics serve as a key conduit in parent-to-child transmission of anxiety. Dyadic social dynamics capture the moment-to-moment interactions between parent and child that occur on a daily basis. In shaping the developmental trajectory from familial risk to actual symptoms, dyadic processes act on mechanisms of risk that are evident prior to, and in the absence of, any eventual disorder onset. First, we discuss dyadic synchrony or the moment-to-moment coordination between parent and child within different levels of analysis, including neural, autonomic, behavioral, and emotional processes. Second, we discuss how overt emotion modeling of distress is observed and internalized by children and later reflected in their own behavior. Thus, unlike synchrony, this is a more sequential process that cuts across levels of analysis. We also discuss maladaptive cognitive and affective processing that is often evident with increases in child anxiety symptoms. Finally, we discuss additional moderators (e.g., parent sex, child fearful temperament) that may impact dyadic processes. Our model is proposed as a conceptual framework for testing hypotheses regarding dynamic processes that may ultimately guide novel treatment approaches aimed at intervening on dyadically linked biobehavioral mechanisms before symptom onset.

How the Emotional Environment Shapes the Emotional Life of the Child

Emotion understanding facilitates the development of healthy social interactions. To develop emotion knowledge, infants and young children must learn to make inferences about people's dynamically changing facial and vocal expressions in the context of their everyday lives. Given that emotional information varies so widely, the emotional input that children receive might particularly shape their emotion understanding over time. This review explores how variation in children's received emotional input shapes their emotion understanding and their emotional behavior over the course of development. Variation in emotional input from caregivers shapes individual differences in infants' emotion perception and understanding, as well as older children's emotional behavior. Finally, this work can inform policy and focus interventions designed to help infants and young children with social-emotional development.

The kleineWeltentdecker App - A smartphone-based developmental diary

Today, a vast number of tools exist to measure development in early childhood in a variety of domains such as cognition, language, or motor, cognition. These tools vary in different aspects. Either children are examined by a trained experimenter, or caregivers fill out questionnaires. The tools are applied in the controlled setting of a laboratory or in the children's natural environment. While these tools provide a detailed picture of the current state of children's development, they are at the same time subject to several constraints. Furthermore, the measurement of an individual child's change of different skills over time requires not only one measurement but high-density longitudinal assessments. These assessments are time-consuming, and the breadth of developmental domains assessed remains limited. In this paper, we present a novel tool to assess the development of skills in different domains, a smartphone-based developmental diary app (the kleineWeltentdecker App, henceforth referred to as the APP (The German expression "kleine Weltentdecker" can be translated as "young world explorers".)). By using the APP, caregivers can track changes in their children's skills during development. Here, we report the construction and validation of the questionnaires embedded in the APP as well as the technical details. Empirical validations with children of different age groups confirmed the robustness of the different measures implemented in the APP. In addition, we report preliminary findings, for example, on children's communicative development by using existing APP data. This substantiates the validity of the assessment. With the APP, we put a portable tool for the longitudinal documentation of individual children's development in every caregiver's pocket, worldwide.

Mechanisms of False Alarm in Response to Fear Stimulus: An Event-Related Potential Study

Background and Objective

There is a paucity of research that has explored “False Alarm” mechanisms. In order to remedy this deficiency in knowledge, the present study used event-related potential (ERP) technology to reveal the mechanisms underlying False Alarm in response to fear stimuli.

Methods

This study selected snakes as experimental materials and the “oddball paradigm” was used to simulate the conditions of False Alarm. The mechanism underlying False Alarm was revealed by comparing cognitive processing similarities and differences between real snakes and toy snakes.

Results

Event-related potential findings demonstrated that there was no significant difference between N1 and P2 components induced by real and toy snakes in the early processing stage. Compared with toy snakes, real snakes induced smaller N2 amplitude, larger P3 amplitude, and a shorter P3 latency at the late processing stage. The results of brain topographic mapping analysis showed that the brain regions activated by a real or toy snake were basically the same within the time windows of 110–150 and 220–270 ms, respectively. In the time window of 300–360 and 400–500 ms, the degree of brain regions activation with a real snake was significantly greater than that induced by a toy snake.

Conclusion

False Alarm is caused by the brain’s inability to distinguish, in the early stage of cognitive processing, stimulus objects with similar appearances. When the brain is able to distinguish the differences between different stimulus objects in the late stage of cognitive processing, False Alarm disappears.

Children's Evolved Learning Abilities and Their Implications for Education

In this article, I examine children's evolved learning mechanisms that make humans the most educable of animals. These include (1) skeletal perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that get fleshed out over the course of development, mainly through play; (2) a high level of plasticity that is greatest early in life but that persists into adulthood; (3) remarkable social-learning capabilities; and (4) dispositions toward exploration and play. I next examine some evolutionary mismatches-conflicts between psychological mechanisms evolved in ancient environments and their utility in modern ones-specifically with respect to modern educational systems. I then suggest some ways educators can take advantage of children's evolved learning abilities to minimize the effects of evolutionary mismatches, including (1) following developmentally appropriate practices (which are also evolutionarily appropriate practices), (2) increasing opportunities for physical activities, (3) increasing opportunities to learn through play, and (4) taking advantage of stress-adapted children's "hidden talents." I argue that evolutionary theory informs teachers and parents about how children evolved to learn and can result in more-enlightened teaching methods that will result in a more enjoyable and successful learning experiences for children.

The Development of Emotion Reasoning in Infancy and Early Childhood

Historically, research characterizing the development of emotion recognition has focused on identifying specific skills and the age periods, or milestones, at which these abilities emerge. However, advances in emotion research raise questions about whether this conceptualization accurately reflects how children learn about, understand, and respond to others’ emotions in everyday life. In this review, we propose a developmental framework for the emergence of emotion reasoning—that is, how children develop the ability to make reasonably accurate inferences and predictions about the emotion states of other people. We describe how this framework holds promise for building upon extant research. Our review suggests that use of the term emotion recognition can be misleading and imprecise, with the developmental processes of interest better characterized by the term emotion reasoning. We also highlight how the age at which children succeed on many tasks reflects myriad developmental processes. This new framing of emotional development can open new lines of inquiry about how humans learn to navigate their social worlds.

Attend Less, Fear More: Elevated Distress to Social Threat in Toddlers With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Differential emotional reactivity to social and nonsocial stimuli has been hypothesized but rarely examined empirically in ASD despite its potential importance for development of social motivation, cognition, and comorbid psychopathology. This study examined emotional reactivity, regulation, and attention to social and nonsocial threat in toddlers with ASD (n = 42, M_age : 22 months) and typically developing (TD) toddlers (n = 22, M_age : 23 months), and their mutual associations with autism symptom severity. Participants were exposed to social (stranger), nonsocial (mechanical objects), and ambiguous (masks) threats, and their intensity of distress (iDistress), attention to threat (Attention), and presence of emotion regulation (ER) strategies were measured. Autism symptom severity was quantified using the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-2. In response to social threat, toddlers with ASD exhibited elevated iDistress (P < 0.038) but lower Attention (P < 0.002) and a wider variety of ER strategies (P < 0.040) compared to TD controls, though their ER strategies were less likely to be social. However, nonsocial and ambiguous threat elicited lower iDistress in ASD than in TD toddlers (P = 0.012 and P = 0.034, respectively), but comparable Attention and ER strategy use. Autism severity was not associated with iDistress. The study demonstrates elevated emotional salience but diminished attentional salience of social threat in ASD. A failure to attend adequately to social threats may restrict opportunities to appraise their threat value and engender often observed in ASD negative emotional responses to novel social situations. Early atypical emotional reactivity may independently contribute to the shaping of complex autism phenotypes and may be linked with later emerging affective and behavioral symptoms. LAY SUMMARY: Compared to typically developing toddlers, toddlers with ASD show diminished attention yet enhanced distress in response to social threat. Poor attention to potential social threat may limit opportunities to assess its threat value and thus contribute to often observed negative emotional responses to novel social situations. Identifying the precursors of atypical emotional reactivity in infancy and its links with later psychopathology will inform about novel treatment targets and mechanisms of change in the early stages of ASD. Autism Res 2021, 14: 1025-1036. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, LLC.

Atypical Emotional Electrodermal Activity in Toddlers with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Past studies in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) indicate atypical peripheral physiological arousal. However, the conditions under which these atypicalities arise and their link with behavioral emotional expressions and core ASD symptoms remain uncertain. Given the importance of physiological arousal in affective, learning, and cognitive processes, the current study examined changes in skin conductance level (ΔSCL) in 41 toddlers with ASD (mean age: 22.7 months, SD: 2.9) and 32 age-matched toddlers with typical development (TD) (mean age: 21.6 months, SD: 3.6) in response to probes designed to induce anger, joy, and fear emotions. The magnitude of ΔSCL was comparable during anger (P = 0.206, d = 0.30) and joy (P = 0.996, d = 0.01) conditions, but significantly lower during the fear condition (P = 0.001, d = 0.83) in toddlers with ASD compared to TD peers. In the combined samples, ΔSCL positively correlated with intensity of behavioral emotional expressivity during the anger (r[71] = 0.36, P = 0.002) and fear (r[68] = 0.32, P = 0.007) conditions, but not in the joy (r[69] = -0.15, P = 0.226) condition. Finally, ΔSCL did not associate with autism symptom severity in any emotion-eliciting condition in the ASD group. Toddlers with ASD displayed attenuated ΔSCL to situations aimed at eliciting fear, which may forecast the emergence of highly prevalent internalizing and externalizing problems in this population. The study putatively identifies ΔSCL as a dimension not associated with severity of autism but with behavioral responses in negatively emotionally challenging events and provides support for the feasibility, validity, and incipient utility of examining ΔSCL in response to emotional challenges in very young children. LAY SUMMARY: Physiological arousal was measured in toddlers with autism exposed to frustrating, pleasant, and threatening tasks. Compared to typically developing peers, toddlers with autism showed comparable arousal responses to frustrating and pleasant events, but lower responses to threatening events. Importantly, physiological arousal and behavioral expressions were aligned during frustrating and threatening events, inviting exploration of physiological arousal to measure responses to emotional challenges. Furthermore, this study advances the understanding of precursors to emotional and behavioral problems common in older children with autism. Autism Res 2020, 13: 1476-1488. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Oh, Behave!: PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS, XXth International Conference on Infant Studies New Orleans, LA, US May 2016

Behavior is essential for understanding infant learning and development. Although behavior is transient and ephemeral, we have the technology to make it tangible and enduring. Video uniquely captures and preserves the details of behavior and the surrounding context. By sharing videos for documentation and data reuse, we can exploit the tremendous opportuni-ties provided by infancy research and overcome the important challenges in studying behavior. The Datavyu video coding software and Databrary digital video library provide tools and infrastructure for mining and sharing the richness of video. This article is based on my Presidential Address to the International Congress on Infant Studies in New Orleans, May 22, 2016 (Video 1 at https://www.databrary.org/volume/955/slot/39352/-?asset=190106. Given that the article de-scribes the power of video for understanding behavior, I use video clips rather than static images to illustrate most of my points, and the videos are shared on the Databrary library.

Is there evidence for sensitive periods in emotional development?

During sensitive periods an individual's development is especially receptive to information from the environment in ways that it is not at earlier and later developmental stages. Here, we describe challenges in applying the concept of sensitive periods to the domain of socio-emotional development, review what applications of this approach have accomplished, and point to promising future directions. We also argue that since emotional development consists of higher-order cognitive processes, it likely involves multiple and overlapping sensitive periods tied to different mechanisms (e.g., facial recognition, reward processing, fear conditioning). Moreover, we note a distinction between the construct of a sensitive period versus the identification of an effect of early experience-two ideas that are often confused in the literature. Progress in the study of emotion will require understanding the mechanisms involved in developmental change and models that predict children's behavior based on their prior experience.

The importance of using multiple outcome measures in infant research

Collecting data with infants is notoriously difficult. As a result, many of our studies consist of small samples, with only a single measure, in a single age group, at a single time point. With renewed calls for greater academic rigor in data collection practices, using multiple outcome measures in infant research is one way to increase rigor, and, at the same time, enable us to more accurately interpret our data. Here, we illustrate the importance of using multiple measures in psychological research with examples from our own work on rapid threat detection and from the broader infancy literature. First, we describe our initial studies using a single outcome measure, and how this strategy caused us to nearly miss a rich and complex story about attention biases for threat and their development. We demonstrate how using converging measures can help researchers make inferences about infant behavior, and how using additional measures allows us to more deeply examine the mechanisms that drive developmental change. Finally, we provide practical and statistical recommendations for how researchers can use multiple measures in future work.

Coincidence or cascade? The temporal relation between locomotor behaviors and the emergence of stranger anxiety

Two infant milestones, self-propelled locomotion and stranger anxiety, tend to emerge at a similar age in development. An adaptive relation may exist in which the onset of one influences the development of the other in individual children. We examine whether these milestones systematically co-occur and whether one reliably precedes the other. In the current study, 104 parents completed weekly online surveys between 6 and 12 months, noting milestones as they occurred. Onset ages for locomotor behaviors were correlated with onset of stranger anxiety over and above a milestone in a third domain, namely consonant-vowel babbling. These data suggest that infants' earliest locomotor behaviors may play a role in galvanizing the development of stranger anxiety.

Progress in understanding the emergence of human emotion

In the past several decades, research on emotional development has flourished. Scientists have made progress in understanding infants', children's, and adults' abilities to recognize, communicate, and regulate their emotions. However, many questions remain unanswered or only partly answered. We are poised to move from descriptions of aspects of emotional functioning to conceptualizing and studying the developmental mechanisms that underlie those aspects. The gaps in our knowledge provide numerous opportunities for further investigation. With this special issue of Developmental Psychology, we aim to stimulate such progress, especially among colleagues at the beginning of their careers. The articles in this issue are intended to challenge our concepts and take research on emotional development in new directions. Toward this end, this special issue includes empirical studies, theoretical articles, novel conceptualizations, methodological innovations, and invited commentaries from scholars across a range of disciplines. In this introductory essay, we briefly review the history of research on emotional development and provide an overview of the contributions of this special issue with thoughts about the current state of the developmental science and areas in which further advancement on emotional development must be made. These include understanding the nature of emotion itself, identifying the mechanisms that produce developmental changes, examining emotion regulation within differing social contexts, and creating measures of culture that acknowledge globalization, historical change, and within-culture differences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).