Examining Infant Asymmetry Across an Extended Negative Emotion Eliciting Task

Frontal electroencephalograph (EEG) asymmetry has emerged as a prominent neurophysiological temperament correlate, with relative left activation reflecting approach/positive affectivity and relative right activation indicative of avoidance emotions/motivation. EEG asymmetry during emotion-eliciting tasks has not been sufficiently examined, and this study considered changes in infant frontal alpha asymmetry during a distress-eliciting task relative to baseline, consistent with the capability model. This project had three primary aims: (1) model temperament effects related to changes in asymmetry across an emotion-eliciting task; (2) model effects of mother-infant interaction quality related to changes in asymmetry across trials of this task; and (3) quantify the extent to which frontal alpha asymmetry growth parameters across an emotion-eliciting task predict infant task completion – i.e., whether or not all of the trials of the task had been completed, or the task had to be cut short due to excessive distress. To address the first two aims/hypotheses, a latent growth model was estimated, considering infant EEG asymmetry across the five distinct trials of the Still-Face Paradigm, with the parent-child interaction and temperament factors used as predictors of intercept and growth parameters in turn. For the third aim/hypothesis, another latent model was examined, determining if frontal asymmetry growth parameters predict an infant’s ability to complete the task. Initial analysis supported a linear model as the best fitting parameter, and subsequently were computed with the interaction and temperament factors. Overall hypotheses were not supported, indicating that neither infants’ temperament nor their interactions with parents significantly impacted their neurophysiology at the start of the SFP task. Results and future directions are discussed in full.