Parental stress can have a negative impact on attentional bias in infants, which is an emotion processing construct. The present study investigated if parental stress is positively related to...Show moreParental stress can have a negative impact on attentional bias in infants, which is an emotion processing construct. The present study investigated if parental stress is positively related to attentional bias towards fearful over happy faces in infants aged 5 to 19 months. The sample consisted out of 220 infants (male: 48,2%, female: 51,2%) and their 229 primary caregivers (male: 32,3%, female: 67,7%). The research has a cross-sectional experimental design. Attentional bias was measured with an eye-tracker, which measured dwell times in infants when looking at happy and fearful faces. Parental stress was measured with the stress-scale of the DASS. The analyses suggested that parental stress was not positively related to attentional bias of their infants, whereas other studies found that parental stress was positively related to attentional bias. These differences in findings may be due to the fact that SES-variables were not taken into account in the present study. Besides, attentional bias differs across age groups, but also age was not taken into account. Therefore, attentional bias is a dynamic construct, which needs to be further examined with respect to variables that influence the link between parental stress and attentional bias.Show less
