Study title

This data set contains data collected from 21 infants and their mothers, using behavioural and physiological measurement. The experiment aimed to investigate shared body representations between a mother and her infant, and consisted of two main tasks. The first, the Mother-Infant Bodily Overlap (MIBO) task, was designed to measure the extent to which an infant ‘shared’ in the tactile experiences of their mother. The task carried out with the infants took the form of a preferential looking paradigm. For each trial, infants were shown two side-by-side videos, both featuring either their mother, or an unfamiliar woman, being stroked on the cheek. The infant’s own cheek was stroked by an experimenter, in synchrony with the touch seen in one of the videos and out-of-synchrony with the touch seen in the other video. Looking times were coded to the two videos. The second task investigated the extent to which mothers shared the emotional experiences of their infant. We measured automatic facial mimicry using electromyography (EMG) recorded from the corrugator and zygomaticus muscles, whilst mothers were observing emotional expressions recorded from their infant, or from an unfamiliar infant. We also asked mothers to indicate after each video their subjective emotional experience during the expression, using a 2-dimentional Visual Analogue Scale upon which mothers rated their valence and arousal. Two other data collections have been created for this grant, Part 1 and Part 2. These can be accessed via Related Resources. Humans are fundamentally social animals. We form close relationships with others and characteristically live in small, close social groups of siblings, romantic partners, and our infants. Social psychologists have shown that the way in which we process social information from our family members and intimate partners is very different to that from strangers and acquaintances. For example, we show increased empathy when our intimate partners are in pain,...