London - Dummies are likely to interfere with parents’ ability to interpret and respond to a baby’s happiness or distress, according to a study.
Women looking at images of smiling babies with dummies rated the infants as less happy than smiling babies without pacifiers – and they were less likely to smile back at the children with soothers.
When shown pictures of babies looking sad, women rated the sadness as less intense if the baby had a dummy in its mouth.
The results are important because ‘resonance’ with watching adults allows babies “to gain emotional understanding” and develop mentally, said researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison whose study is published in the journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology.
Their findings raise the possibility that parents using dummies to calm a crying infant could harm the parent-child bonding process by obscuring the baby’s face.
Magdalena Rychlowska, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and colleagues used electrodes to track the facial muscles of 29 women while they looked at photos of two young babies expressing happiness, sadness, anger or a neutral emotion.
The participants were also asked to rate the intensity of the emotions they saw on the babies’ faces.
In some images the babies had dummies in their mouths and in others they didn’t. Some also showed a white square superimposed over the baby’s mouth so as to control for any influence the sight of a dummy might have on women beyond the obscuring effect.
Both dummies and white squares over a happy baby’s mouth lowered the activity in women’s zygomaticus muscle, which pulls the mouth into a smile, compared with when there was nothing to obscure a smile.
They both also led to women rating the baby’s happiness as less intense, according to the findings.
The interference caused by a dummy was similar to that with a white square, suggesting the effect is likely to be due to the obscuring effect and not to any cultural or emotional beliefs linked to dummies.
When women looked at sad or angry babies, the corrugator muscle - also known as the “frowning muscle” - was equally as active whether the baby had a dummy or not and nor did a white square change this.
The researchers said that the findings mean that adults may find interacting with babies “less enjoyable and less stimulating” if a dummy is in use. - Daily Mail