Mother-Infant Interaction: an Exploration of Maternal Frontal Alpha Asymmetry During the Still-Face Procedure

Early interactions with the mother have been proven to play a crucial role for the socio-emotional and cognitive development of the infant. The EEG hyperscanning technique allows researchers to dive into the brain dynamics of the dyad. Frontal Alpha Asymmetry (FAA), an index of emotion regulation and motivational processes, is defined as the imbalance of activation between the frontal areas of the two hemispheres. In our study, we combined measures of FAA with the Still-Face Procedure (SFP) from Tronick, which allows us to observe what strategies the mother and the infant display to reconnect following a disruption of the interaction and how this process associates with FAA. We aimed to investigate maternal fluctuation in FAA values across the procedure, as well as the associations between maternal asymmetry and behaviors from the mothers and from the infants. Our results didn’t find any episode effect for maternal FAA. We have also found that positive emotionality displayed by children was significantly associated with positive values in the FAA of the mother during the Play episode of the SFP. This result was further confirmed by associations we found between maternal FAA during the Still-Face episode and the self-report of their infants’ emotions during the same episode. This research experiment joins the few existing studies that merge SFP and FAA, which give contrasting results. Nonetheless, our study gives further feasibility to the employment of SFP and FAA together in order to investigate interactional dynamics in the mother-infant dyad. We were also able to employ micro-analytic coding of behaviors, which can help future research to gain deeper knowledge of the strategies deployed by the dyad in order to achieve emotional and behavioral regulation.