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.
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