Cultural Variation in Emotional Reactivity and Regulation in Infants From Uganda and the UK

Learning to regulate one's emotions is a key feature of socio-emotional development. The still-face experiment-which measures how infants respond to a sudden change in maternal responsiveness-has long been considered a reliable indicator of infant reactivity and regulation. However, as a paradigm established to fit Western, middle-class industrialized contexts, its robustness in other cultural contexts, has been questioned. Differences in responses to the still-face experiment are likely shaped by variation in infant-caregiver interactions and practices. To expand the literature and address sampling biases, we conducted the still-face experiment with 10-month-old infants (N = 138, 68 female) across three sites, in rural and urban Uganda and urban UK. Across sites, we found the expected patterns of decreased infant positive affect and gaze toward their caregiver in the still-face phase. However, while infants in urban Uganda and the UK exhibited increased negative affect when their mother ceased interacting, infants from rural Uganda did not. Our findings highlight important variation across socio-cultural contexts in infant emotional reactivity and interaction style, suggesting that infants' responses to the still-face paradigm may be shaped by the broader caregiving environments in which they develop.