Date of Award

6-11-2025

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Margaret Guy

Second Advisor

Denise Davidson

Abstract

By 7 months of age, infants typically develop a bias toward threatening facial expressions, such as fear and anger (Leppänen & Nelson, 2009; Leppänen et al., 2018; Peltola et al., 2009; 2013). However, individual differences in threat-related attention biases in adulthood are related to socioemotional functioning across a broad range of outcomes, including racial biases and psychological well-being. Links between attention and socioemotional development may begin in infancy, with prior evidence demonstrating that both maternal well-being and race may bias visual processing of emotional expressions (Morales et al., 2017; Vogel et al., 2017; Quinn et al., 2018; 2020). Thus, the current study aimed to examine the impact of two potential modulators of infant threat bias, maternal anxiety and racial and ethnic identity, on attention to emotional expressions. In pursuit of these aims, 40 mother-infant dyads participated in this study asynchronously online. Infants completed a preferential looking paradigm viewing pairs of own- and other-race faces expressing happy, angry, fearful, and sad emotion. Mothers completed measures of community and caregiving network diversity, depression, and anxiety. Results showed that infants were biased toward fearful expressions regardless of in- or out-group racial categorization, while race simultaneously biased attention to other negatively-valenced expressions (i.e., sad, angry). Maternal anxiety was uncorrelated with attention biases in our sample of 7-month-olds; however, experience-dependent shaping of emotion perception was observed through infant exposure to racial and ethnic diversity. These findings provide evidence of distinct responses to affect by in- and out-group racial categorizations by 7-months-of-age and has implications for the role of early experience in shaping visual attention biases for emotion.

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