Socio-emotional stress regulation in infants with visual impairment during the Still-Face Procedure

Mother-infant interaction is critical to promoting adaptive socio-emotional and cognitive development. During the face-to-face interaction, both mothers and infants make meanings and adapt their behaviors accordingly. However, if any rupture occurs is essential how mother-infant dyads would regulate the stress and repair this communicative mismatched moment. The present study aimed to observe how visually impaired infants and their mothers would be affected by a rupture that occurred during face-to-face interaction, we used the Face-to-face Still-Face Paradigm for this purpose which is an experiment that includes 3 episodes (play, still-face, and Reunion). Firstly, we have investigated how low vision infants react to the Still-Face experiment compared to a control group, secondly, we have examined how mothers of low vision infants regulate their behaviors such as maternal vocalization and maternal touch through the Still-Face experiment phases. We found that both the visually impaired and sighted infants react to the Still-Face with an increased negative emotionality and gaze avoiding behavior. For the mothers’ behaviors, we observed that mothers of sighted infants use more explanation types of vocalizationn in the reunion phase. Moreover, between the play and reunion episode sighted infants' mothers decreased the use of playful touch while the mothers of visually impaired infants have increased it. Results demonstrated that visual impairment has not changed the stress reaction of the infants to a mismatched moment of face-to-face dyadic interaction. Meanwhile, the behaviors of mothers; the type of vocalization used, and also the touch have differed. Further studies may focus on the reasons of the differences in mothers behaviors and investigate possible support programs for mothers or primary caregivers that are in dyadic interaction often with the infants.