Director of the Child Development Unit at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Dr. Edward Tronick, was noted in an article by CBC.ca earlier this month for his highly-credited “still-face experiment.”
Tronick and his colleagues first presented the experiment to the Society for Research in Child Development in 1975. In the experiment, an infant grew upset after approximately three minutes of interaction with a non-responsive, expressionless mother. In response, the child would then usually attempt to regain the attention of his mother. The experiment predicted that even if the child’s attempts to gain the mother’s attention failed, the child will withdraw first physically, then emotionally.
According to Dr. Julaine Brent from the Psychology Foundation of Canada who wrote the CBC article, the still-face experiment shows the importance of parent-child interactions in developing a child’s “physical, emotional, and psychological well-being.”
“This early parent-child relationship creates a blueprint or internal working model for future relationships,” Brent wrote in the article.
In late November of 2009, UMass Boston published a video of the recorded still-face experiment between a mother and her one-year-old child. In the video, the child first responds cheerfully to the mother’s playful gestures and greetings. When the mother ceases to express such gestures, the baby evidently seeks to gain the mother’s attention back. Despite the baby’s efforts, the mother remains expressionless and ultimately the baby withdraws. “When they don’t get the normal reactions, they react with negative emotions, they turn away, they feel the stress of it. They actually lose control of their posture,” Tronick stated in the video.
Tronick’s experiment was also recognized in 2010 by Scienceblogs, a year after the publication of the video. “When these attempts fail, the infant withdraws [and] orients his face and body away from his mother with a withdrawn, hopeless facial expression,” Tronick told Scienceblogs in 2010.
“Babies this young, are extremely responsive to the emotions and the reactivity and the social interaction that they get from the world around them,” Tronick said in the video.
Scienceblogs stated that Tronick’s experiment now remains as “one of the most replicated findings in developmental psychology” and a standard method for testing psychological-based hypotheses, especially in investigating infants of parents who may have been clinically depressed in the past.
“The still-face experiment demonstrated that very young infants already have several basic building blocks of social cognition in place,” Scienceblogs stated.
“This is something we started studying 30, 40 years ago, when people didn’t think that infants could engage in social interaction,” Tronick added.