Affective Reactions to Social Exposure in Infancy: The Development and Socialization of Rudimentary Self-Conscious Emotions

Affective reactions to social exposure, typically labelled as self-conscious emotions of embarrassment or shyness, are important for navigating social life. These affective reactions can already be observed in infancy and are theorized to originate from the interplay between early caregiver-infant socialization practices and temperamental predispositions. In this preregistered longitudinal study, we examined the developmental and socialization factors contributing to the emergence of affective reactions to social exposure. Here, we focused on the coy smile: a smile accompanied by a gaze and/or head aversion, which has been characterized a typical sign of embarrassment and shyness. Infants at six-months (N=103) and 15-months (N=77) participated in a social exposure task in which they were lavishly complimented in four situations, a context known to elicit coy smiles across human development. At the six-month measurement, mother–infant dyads also engaged in two interaction tasks in which we assessed two socialization factors: mind-mindedness and positive affective synchrony, while mothers reported on infant temperament as a measure of dispositional tendencies. Results showed strong evidence for an effect of time, with six-month-olds displaying more coy smiles than 15-month-olds. Higher negative temperament predicted fewer coy smiles; while mother’s own coy smiling predicted more coy smiles across infancy. No effects of mind-mindedness or positive affective synchrony were found. These findings suggest that infants’ coy smiling in contexts of social exposure may initially be shaped primarily by age, temperamental dispositions, and possible modelling of maternal behavior, rather than the measured socialization practices.