Smiling at your baby may boost emotional development
Two new studies suggest that smiling and other positive interactions with caregivers help shape infants' emotional development.
A new study published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B suggests that positive interactions between babies and their mothers, such as smiling and laughing, may be crucial for the development of emotional regulation skills and overall emotional well-being. Researchers measured heart rate changes in nearly 1,000 4-month-old infants during positive interactions with their mothers, discovering that shared positive engagement led to physiological changes linked to emotion regulation.
Daniel Messinger, a professor at the University of Miami and a senior author on the paper, noted that "Play is not just fun and games. It's influencing the baby's physiology." The study, conducted across four U.S. sites, controlled for factors like prenatal drug exposure and social adversity, and found that both the baby and the mother needed to show positive emotions simultaneously for heart-rate variability to increase.
This indicates that positive social interactions play a significant role in shaping a baby's emotional development.
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