The effects of maternal affectionate touch on infant exploratory behaviours and cognitive flexibility

• Main Author: Phan, Valerie Yong Chee
• Other Authors: Victoria Leong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Social sciences::Psychology::Affection and emotion
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/168520
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Exploration has been studied to impact infants’ cognitive development, tuned by various factors including socialisation. As socialisation serves multiple functions to motivate infant’s exploratory behaviours in early life, this paper streamlines the provider of socialisation to examine the effects of maternal touches. Previous research had analysed the benefits of maternal affective touch to regulate infant’s affective states, reduce stress and provide a safe base for infants to explore from. In contrast, this study aims to study the effects of maternal affectionate touch, a broader form of touch that encompasses affective touches, on infants’ exploratory behaviours through a 10-min free play task, observing naturalistic interactions between mother and child. Secondly, it is predicted that maternal affectionate touch would be positively correlated with cognitive performance. Here, cognitive performance examines cognitive flexibility during an attention set shifting task. Together, the findings seemed to suggest a lack of significant relationship between exploration and affectionate touches as well as between maternal affectionate touches and infants’ cognitive development in a multiple comparison correlation analysis. Implications and further interpretations were discussed.