Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
To investigate developmental changes in infant responses to the mother's still face (SF), we ob-served 37 mother-infant dyads in the laboratory when infants were 3 and 6 months old. Infantsreduced their smiling and increased their gazing away from mother during the SF at both 3 and 6months. Compared with 3-month-olds, 6-month-olds were more likely to use directed hand activi-ties while gazing away from mother. Results suggest that developmental changes in gaze and motoractivity are incorporated into the infant's response to a stressful situation.The still-face situation, in which mothers freeze their faceand stop talking to their infants, has been used by a number ofinvestigators to study the effect of alterations in maternal emo-tional expressions on infant behavior (Cohn Field, Vega-Lahr, Scafidi, Fogel, Diamond,Langhorst, Gusella, Muir, Mayes Murray Stack M Stoller Tronick, Als, Adamson,Wise, Fogel, 1980). Using a video-taped image of the mother, Gusella et al. (1988) presented in-fants with the following conditions: a still face plus interactivevoice of the mother, a no-voice interactive face, and a no-voicestill face. The still face, with or without the voice, had the sameeffect as in the live still-face situation, whereas the interactiveface without the voice did not produce a typical still-face effect.Finally, Gusella et al. (1988) compared infants who experienceda normal/still face/normal sequence of conditions with infantswho experienced a-normal/normal/normal sequence. The in-Sueko Toda, Department of Psychology, Shirayuri College, Tokyo,Japan; Alan Fogel, Department of Psychology, University of Utah.We thank P. W Berman and M. H. Bornstein for comments.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed toSueko Toda, Shirayuri College, 5-7-48-202, Oshitate-cho, Fuchu-shi,Tokyo 183, Japan, or to Alan Fogel, Department of Psychology, Univer-sity of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112.fants who experienced the still face behaved significantly dif-ferently in th e secon d an thir conditions of sequenccompared with infants who had three normal interactions in arow. The still-face effect, therefore, is not due to maternal si-lence, to the order of presentation, or to elapsed time.The study by Gusella et al. (1988) is one of the few to reportinfants' responses to the still face at any age other than 3months. Their study compared infants at 3 and 6 months. At 6months, they found identical effects for differences betweennormal and still-face conditions in the duration of gazing andsmiling that have been described for the 3-month-olds. Themain age difference was that 6-month-olds gazed away longerduring the still face than 3-month-olds, but this could be ex-plained by the normative increase reported for gaze away frommother at 6 months compared with at 3 months during thenormal spontaneous interaction (Cohn Kaye Sroufe Stern, 1977). Field (1981) found that gazing away from themother is a common strategy used to modulate arousal and toprocess information about distressing events or situations, asshown by a relation between heart rate changes and gaze aver-sion. By 6 months, gaze aversion may be related more to aredirection of infant attention, away from mother and towardphysical objects (Kaye White, Castle, that is, they did not co-occur with infant gaze aver-sion. Gianino and Tronick (1988), reporting on the same dataas Gusella et al. (1988), found that 6-month-old infants looked532
Toda et al. (Sat,) studied this question.