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Social referencing and secure-base behaviors: A comparison of infants from maltreating, low-income and middle-income families
Abstract
This investigation explored the systemic effects of child maltreatment on the development of mother-infant interaction patterns as evidenced by the frequencies of (a) social referencing; (b) supportive looks; (c) supportive looks with subsequent movement toward mother; and (d) emotional resourcing; in addition to (e) infant proximity to mother; and (f) infant proximity to novel stimuli during a series of five episodes. Two of the episodes were designed to elicit emotional uncertainty from the infant, while the other three focused solely on mother-infant interaction. Sixty-three infants were divided equally into three groups: maltreated, low-income; non-maltreated, low-income; and non-maltreated, middle-income. It was expected that maltreatment would have significant consequences for infant emotional development and subsequently affect the infant's seeking-out of emotional information from the mother in these ways. Maltreated and lower-income infants differed from middle-class infants in the following ways: middle-income infants tended to use supportive looks and emotional resourcing more frequently than the maltreated or low-income infant groups. It is important to note, however, that although such differences in emotional functioning were in the expected direction, they failed to achieve significance, possibly due to small sample sizes and the lack of statistical power. In contrast, maltreated and lower-income infants differed from each other in the distances they maintained from novel stimuli--maltreated infants maintained the closest distance to the stimuli, middle-income infants, an intermediate distance, and the low-income infants, the farthest distance. Among the significant age differences were the following: older infants tended to reference, and emotionally resource their mothers more often than younger infants; and, older infants maintained a closer distance than younger infants to their mothers. No gender differences in the measures of emotional functioning employed for this investigation were observed. The results suggested that the maltreated and low-income infant groups were more similar than dissimilar, while both groups tended to be significantly different from the middle-income infant group. In addition, all infants tended to use both distal (i.e., social referencing) and proximal (i.e., proximity-seeking) forms of emotional interaction to reduce the emotional uncertainty elicited by the novel stimuli.
Subject Area
Psychotherapy|Developmental psychology|Families & family life|Personal relationships|Sociology
Recommended Citation
Benson, Steven A, "Social referencing and secure-base behaviors: A comparison of infants from maltreating, low-income and middle-income families" (1987). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8803741.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8803741