Читать книгу Lifespan Development - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 323

From birth, babies develop a repertoire of behavior signals to which adults naturally attend and respond, such as smiling, cooing, and clinging. Crying is a particularly effective signal because it conveys negative emotion that adults can judge reliably, and it motivates adults to relieve the infants’ distress. Adults are innately drawn to infants, find infants’ signals irresistible, and respond in kind. For example, one recent study found that nearly 700 mothers in 11 countries (Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Cameroon, France, Kenya, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the United States) tended to respond to their infants’ cries and distress by picking up, holding, and talking to their infants (Bornstein et al., 2017). Infants’ behaviors, immature appearance, and even smell draw adults’ responses (Kringelbach, Stark, Alexander, Bornstein, & Stein, 2016). Infants, in turn, are attracted to caregivers who respond consistently and appropriately to their signals. During the first months of life, infants rely on caregivers to regulate their states and emotions—to soothe them when they are distressed and help them establish and maintain an alert state (Thompson, 2013). Attachment behaviors provide comfort and security to infants because they bring babies close to adults who can protect them.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans support a biological component to attachment as first-time mothers show specific patterns of brain activity in response to infants. Mothers’ brains light up with activity when they see their own infants’ faces, and areas of the brain that are associated with rewards are activated specifically in response to happy, but not sad, infant faces (Strathearn, Jian, Fonagy, & Montague, 2008). In response to their infants’ cries, U.S., Chinese, and Italian mothers show brain activity in regions associated with auditory processing, emotion, and the intention to move and speak, suggesting automatic responses to infant expressions of distress (Bornstein et al., 2017).