title: Maternal personality and infants' neural and visual responsivity to facial expressions of emotion.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Recent investigations suggest that experience plays an important role in the development of face processing. The aim of this study was to investigate the potential role of experience in the development of the ability to process facial expressions of emotion.
  
  
  METHODS
  We examined the potential role of experience indirectly by investigating the relationship between the emotional environment provided by mothers (as indexed by affective measures of their personality) and 7-month-olds' processing of emotional expressions (as indexed by visual attention and event-related potentials [ERPs]).
  
  
  RESULTS
  For positive emotion, infants with highly positive mothers looked longer at fearful than happy expressions, and a subset of these infants who themselves also scored highly on positive temperament showed a larger negative central (Nc) component in the ERP to fearful than happy faces. For negative emotion, there were no detectable influences of maternal personality, although very fearful infants showed a larger Nc to fearful than happy expressions over the right hemisphere.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  To the extent that these variations in maternal disposition reflect variations in their expression of positive facial expressions, these results suggest that the emotional environment experienced by infants contributes to the development of their responses to facial expressions.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Child Health, University College London, UK.
authors.forename: Michelle
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: de Haan
authors.forename: Jay
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Belsky
authors.forename: Vincent
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Reid
authors.forename: Agnes
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Volein
authors.forename: Mark H
authors.initials: MH
authors.lastname: Johnson
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D019260:Expressed Emotion; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D010551:Personality; D014796:Visual Perception