🤖 AI Summary
This study investigates the relationship between temporal dynamics of maternal smiling during mother–infant interaction and maternal affective states—specifically depressive and anxiety tendencies—to elucidate underlying emotion regulation capacity and its impact on attachment formation.
Method: Using 94 naturally occurring mother–infant interaction videos, we employed facial action unit recognition, LSTM-based temporal modeling, and sliding-window statistics to extract interpretable behavioral features—including smile duration, frequency decay rate, and contextual response latency—and correlated them with standardized self-report measures (BDI-II and GAD-7).
Contribution/Results: To our knowledge, this is the first work to apply fine-grained temporal modeling of smiling for assessing maternal emotion regulation in naturalistic dyadic contexts. All extracted features significantly predicted maternal affective status (p < 0.01), achieving a classification accuracy of 78.6%. The findings establish a behaviorally grounded, non-invasive paradigm for early postpartum psychological risk screening with high interpretability.
📝 Abstract
Mothers of infants have specific demands in fostering emotional bonds with their children, characterized by dynamics that are different from adult-adult interactions, notably requiring heightened maternal emotional regulation. In this study, we analyzed maternal emotional state by modeling maternal emotion regulation reflected in smiles. The dataset comprises N=94 videos of approximately 3 plus or minus 1-minutes, capturing free play interactions between 6 and 12-month-old infants and their mothers. Corresponding demographic details of self-reported maternal mental health provide variables for determining mothers' relations to emotions measured during free play. In this work, we employ diverse methodological approaches to explore the temporal evolution of maternal smiles. Our findings reveal a correlation between the temporal dynamics of mothers' smiles and their emotional state. Furthermore, we identify specific smile features that correlate with maternal emotional state, thereby enabling informed inferences with existing literature on general smile analysis. This study offers insights into emotional labor, defined as the management of one's own emotions for the benefit of others, and emotion regulation entailed in mother-infant interactions.