Vanessa LoBue

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey | Rutgers · Department of Psychology (Newark)

Researchers have proposed that humans have evolved psychological mechanisms that facilitate the detection, rapid response, and subsequent avoidance of potential threats. However, some inconsistent results in the literature have called into question the robustness of these responses. Here, we sought to replicate previous findings on the rapid detect...

In the current study, we asked whether children recognize initial inequalities in resources and the effect of these inequalities on subsequent outcomes. We presented 6‐ to 8‐year‐old children with a series of vignettes in which characters’ contribution and effort to a joint task were manipulated, along with the tool they had to complete the task, w...

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), a marker of self‐regulation, has been linked to developmental outcomes in young children. Although positive emotions may have the potential to facilitate physiological self‐regulation, and enhanced self‐regulation could underlie the development of positive emotions in early childhood, the relation between positiv...

This study examined individual differences in affective attention trajectories in infancy and relations with competence and social reticence at 24 months. Data collection spanned 2017 to 2021. Infants (N = 297, 53% White, 49% reported as assigned male at birth) recruited in South Central and Central Pennsylvania and Northern New Jersey provided eye...

Social and emotional learning is crucial for healthy development. Prior work has demonstrated that linguistic input (including emotion and mental state language) is beneficial for early social and emotional learning. In this Perspectives article, we build on existing research and consider the diverse ways in which emotion and mental state language...

Previous research suggests that the use of emotion labels helps children to learn about emotions. However, the mechanism behind this relation remains somewhat elusive. The present study examined 3-year-old children’s (N = 72; Mage = 3.51 years; 42 female) ability to match faces to emotional vignettes, and the role that the use of emotion labels pla...

Introduction: Previous research suggests that negative input contributes to children's fear development, while more positive input can reduce children's fear. The current study examined whether using anthropomorphic input can alter children's learning and attitudes toward snakes in ways that may promote more positive attitudes toward a commonly fea...

This article examines the patterns, and consequences, of infant temperamental reactivity to novel sensory input in a large (N = 357; 271 in current analysis) and diverse longitudinal sample through two approaches. First, we examined profiles of reactivity in 4-month-old infants using the traditional theory-driven analytic approach laid out by Jerom...

Living with a pet is related to a host of socioemotional health benefits for children, yet few studies have examined the mechanisms that drive the relations between pet ownership and positive socioemotional outcomes. The current study examined one of the ways that pets may change the environment through which children learn and whether childhood pe...

Mental rotation is a critically important, early developing spatial skill that is related to other spatial cognitive abilities. Understanding the early development of this skill, however, requires a developmentally appropriate assessment that can be used with infants, toddlers, and young children. We present here a new eye-tracking task that uses a...

The current study examined transactional associations between maternal internalizing symptoms, infant negative emotionality, and infant resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). We used data from the Longitudinal Attention and Temperament Study (N=217) to examine the associations between maternal internalizing symptoms, infant negative emotionali...

Grossmann proposes the "fearful ape hypothesis," suggesting that heightened fearfulness in early life is evolutionarily adaptive. We question this claim with evidence that (1) perceived fearfulness in children is associated with negative, not positive long-term outcomes; (2) caregivers are responsive to all affective behaviors, not just those perce...

Recent research implicates the importance of social and contextual factors in children's fair behavior. Here, we explored the social and emotional influences that might contribute to fair behavior in young children. We examined 79 pairs of 3‐ to 5‐year‐old children ( N = 158; 85 female; M = 4.3 years; Range = 3.03–5.54) in a naturalistic sharing in...

Developmental theories suggest affect-biased attention, preferential attention to emotionally salient stimuli, emerges during infancy through coordinating individual differences. Here we examined bidirectional relations between infant affect-biased attention, temperamental negative affect, and maternal anxiety symptoms using a Random Intercepts Cro...

We examined individual differences in infant affect-biased attention trajectories and relations with caregiver anxiety symptoms, temperamental negative affect and social behavior. Infants (N = 278, 53% White, 49% assigned male at birth) recruited in Central Pennsylvania and Northern New Jersey provided eye-tracking data at 4-, 8-, 12-, 18- and 24-m...

Cross-frequency coupling between delta and beta EEG power may reflect dynamic crosstalk between limbic and cortical regions underlying emotion regulation. Stronger, positive delta-beta coupling is associated with childhood anxiety and fearful temperament, potentially tracking dysregulation. However, most studies have reported on adult populations o...

Attention biases to threat are considered part of the etiology of anxiety disorders. Attention bias variability (ABV) quantifies intraindividual fluctuations in attention biases and may better capture the relation between attention biases and psychopathology risk versus mean levels of attention bias. ABV to threat has been associated with attention...

Evolutionary theories of disease avoidance propose that humans have a set of universal psychological processes to detect environmental cues indicative of infectious disease. These processes then initiate cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses that function to limit contact with harmful pathogens. Here, we study the conditions under which pe...

Snakes and spiders are two of the most commonly feared animals worldwide, yet we know very little about the mechanisms by which such fears are acquired. We explored whether negative information about snakes and spiders from parents shapes children's fear beliefs. Study 1 included 27 parents (22 mothers, five fathers) and children (12 female, 15 mal...

This study examined longitudinal relations between attention and social fear across the first two years of life. Our sample consisted of 357 infants and their caregivers across three sites. Data was collected at 4, 8, 12, 18, and 24 months of age. At all 5 assessments, the infants participated in 2 eye-tracking tasks (Vigilance and Overlap) which m...

This study examined patterns of attention toward affective stimuli in a longitudinal sample of typically developing infants (N = 357, 147 females, 50% White, 22% Latinx, 16% African American/Black, 3% Asian, 8% mixed race, 1% not reported) using two eye-tracking tasks that measure vigilance to (rapid detection), engagement with (total looking towar...

Developmental theories suggest affect-biased attention, preferential attention to emotionally salient stimuli, emerges during infancy through coordinating individual differences. Here we examined bidirectional relations between infant affect-biased attention, temperamental negative affect, and maternal anxiety symptoms. Infant-mother pairs (N = 342...

Age and gender differences are prominent in the temperament literature, with the former particularly salient in infancy and the latter noted as early as the first year of life. This study represents a meta-analysis utilizing Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised (IBQ-R) data collected across multiple laboratories (N = 4438) to overcome limitations...

Attention biases to threat are considered part of the etiology of anxiety disorders. The dot probe task is frequently used to assess attention biases, however traditional bias scores may not be reliable. Attention bias variability (ABV) may better capture the relation between attention biases and psychopathology risk, versus mean levels of attentio...

An attention bias to threat has been linked to psychosocial outcomes across development, including anxiety (Pérez-Edgar et al., 2010). Although some attention biases to threat are normative, it remains unclear how these biases diverge into maladaptive patterns of emotion processing for some infants. Here, we examined the relation between household...

The physical closing of schools due to COVID-19 has disrupted both student learning and family logistics. There is significant pressure for in-person learning to remain open for all children. However, as is expected with outbreaks of novel infections, vaccines and other pharmaceutical therapeutics may not be instantly available. This raises serious...

Spatial play in early childhood is associated with a variety of spatial and cognitive skills. However, these associations are often derived from studies in which different tasks are used across different age ranges, leaving open the question of how children’s natural behaviors during spatial play develop from infancy into the early preschool years....

Here, we observed 3- to 4-year-old children (N=31) and their parents playing with puzzles at home during a zoom session to provide insight into the variability of the kinds of puzzles children have in their home, and the variability in how children and their parents play with spatial toys. We observed a large amount of variability in both children...

Resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) provides developmental neuroscientists a non-invasive view into the neural underpinnings of cognition and emotion. Recently, the psychometric properties of two widely used neural measures in early childhood – frontal alpha asymmetry and delta-beta coupling – have come under scrutiny. Despite their growing...

The present research investigates how a global pandemic may be affecting children’s understanding of contagion. In Study 1, 130 parents (85.4% White, 6.9% Hispanic, 3.8% Asian, 3.8% Black) of children ages 3-9 described discussions surrounding contagion pre- and post-pandemic. Content of these discussions focused on risks and preventative behaviors...

The present research investigates how a global pandemic may be affecting children’s understanding of contagion. In Study 1, 130 parents (85.4 % White, 6.9 % Hispanic, 3.8 % Asian, 3.8 % Black) of children ages 3–9 described discussions surrounding contagion pre- and post-pandemic. Content of these discussions focused on risks and preventative behav...

Background: Attention processes may play a central role in shaping trajectories of socioemotional development. Individuals who are clinically anxious or have high levels of trait anxiety sometimes show attention biases to threat. There is emerging evidence that young children also demonstrate a link between attention bias to salient stimuli and bro...

Snakes and spiders commonly elicit fear. However, despite the pervasiveness of these fears in adulthood, little is known about how they develop in early childhood. Informal learning environments, like zoos, allow for observation of parent-child conversations about these animals. Such naturalistic conversations may contain negative talk and may be o...

Affect-biased attention is an automatic process that prioritizes emotionally or motivationally salient stimuli. Several models of affect-biased attention and its development suggest that it comprises an individual’s ability to both engage with and disengage from emotional stimuli. Researchers typically rely on singular tasks to measure affect-biase...

Emotion recognition plays an important role in children’s socio-emotional development. Research on children’s emotion recognition has heavily relied on stimulus sets of photos of adults posed stereotyped facial configurations. The Child Affective Facial Expression set (CAFE) is a relatively new stimulus set that provides researchers with photograph...

Within the developmental literature, there is an often unspoken tension between studies that aim to capture broad scale, fairly universal nomothetic traits, and studies that focus on mechanisms and trajectories that are idiographic and bounded to some extent by systematic individual differences. The suitability of these approaches vary as a functio...

Collecting data with infants is notoriously difficult. As a result, many of our studies consist of small samples, with only a single measure, in a single age group, at a single time point. With renewed calls for greater academic rigor in data collection practices, using multiple outcome measures in infant research is one way to increase rigor, and...

Although there is a large and growing literature on children’s developing concepts of illness transmission, little is known about how children develop contagion knowledge before formal schooling begins and how these informal learning experiences can impact children’s health behaviors. Here, we asked two important questions: first, do children’s inf...

Affect-biased attention reflects the prioritization of attention to stimuli that individuals deem to be motivationally and/or affectively salient. Normative affect-biased attention is early-emerging, providing an experience-expectant function for socioemotional development. Evidence is limited regarding how reactive and regulatory aspects of temper...

For decades, researchers have been interested in humans’ ability to quickly detect threat-relevant stimuli. Here we review recent findings from infant research on biased attention to threat, and discuss how these data speak to classic assumptions about whether attention biases for threat are normative, whether they change with development, and what...

How and when infants and young children begin to develop emotion categories is not yet well understood. Research has largely treated the learning problem as one of identifying perceptual similarities among exemplars (typically posed, stereotyped facial configurations). However, recent meta-analyses and reviews converge to suggest that emotion categ...

This chapter describes the development of the fetus in the third month of pregnancy. As the author faces the inevitable lifestyle changes that come with being pregnant, she discusses the dangers of various teratogens (i.e., toxins) for the developing fetus. Specifically, she discusses the effects of over-the-counter drugs, alcohol, smoking, materna...

This chapter describes the development of the fetus in the eighth month of pregnancy. This month, as the author’s family plans a baby shower for her, she contemplates what a newborn might need. This is a difficult task, she finds, as newborns have unique personalities right from the beginning of life, with different styles of reacting to the enviro...

This chapter describes the development of the fetus in the fifth month of pregnancy. After discovering that her fetus was inconveniently sleeping through an important ultrasound, the author discusses the science of infant sleep, why fetuses and newborns sleep so much, and the potential importance of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep for a fetus’s deve...

This chapter describes the development of the infant in the second month of life. As LoBue continues to struggle through her son’s colic, she describes important strategies that parents might take to soothe their babies. She focuses on the importance of touch, including strategies like carrying and swaddling. She goes on to discuss the perceptual d...

This chapter describes the development of the infant in the fourth month of life. As her baby begins to coo and communicate for the first time, the author discusses the development of language, from these first sounds to an infant’s first words. She provides an in-depth discussion of how babies break through the speech stream, identifying words in...

This chapter describes the development of the infant in the fifth month of life. When weaning leads to frustration (for both the author and her infant), she begins to notice the colorful array of emotional responses in her infant son. She goes on to describe the development of infants’ emotions and the important role that cognition plays in emotion...

This chapter describes the personal story of the birth of the author’s son. She describes the onset of Braxton Hicks contractions, which are mild pre-labor contractions that can occur anytime during pregnancy, and then the onset of actual labor. Her experience of labor pain, epidural anesthesia, and the birth process itself is documented, as is the...

This chapter describes the development of the infant in the sixth month of life. As her son begins to eat solid foods for the first time, the author marvels at how quickly and easily he learned to eat. The remainder of the chapter focuses on infant cognition and learning, discussing how we might investigate what preverbal infants understand, what t...

9 Months In, 9 Months Out is a month-to-month real-time account of pregnancy and first-time parenthood that integrates the science of infant and child development with the personal journey involved in becoming a parent. Expertise can explain the science of what’s happening to a fetus or a baby throughout development, but all the science in the worl...

This chapter describes the development of the infant in the ninth month of life. As the fall approaches and the author has to return to work, she has to make different choices about childcare. Because in the United States employers are only required to provide 12 weeks of maternity leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), and very often...

This chapter describes the development of the fetus in the sixth month of pregnancy. As the third and final trimester approaches, the author is distinctly aware of her pregnancy with her growing size and the fetus’s forceful and distinct movements. She describes the fetus’s kicking behavior and a variety of reflexes that are fully developed in the...

This chapter discusses the science and biology behind getting pregnant. As the author faces difficulty in conceiving her own first child, she describes the science of conception, ovulation, and why the small ovulation window might make it difficult for any woman, regardless of age, to become pregnant. She goes on to describe the added difficulties...

This chapter describes the development of the fetus in the first 2 months of pregnancy following conception, including the development of the zygote as it travels down the fallopian tube, cell migration and differentiation, and a discussion of stem cells. As the author starts to experience pregnancy for the very first time, she describes common sym...

This chapter describes the development of the infant in the seventh month of life. Now that her son is beginning to sit up on his own, he has begun to notice and watch screens whenever they are in use around him. Revisiting her initial promise to herself to keep her child away from screens for the first 2 years of life, the author reviews research...

This chapter describes the development of the fetus in the ninth month of pregnancy. As the author gets close to delivering, she discusses the stages of labor and the task of creating a birth plan. Specifically, she discusses the benefits of choosing a natural birth versus a planned C-section, and the option of using pain-reducing interventions (e....

This chapter describes the development of the infant in the eighth month of life. In the eighth month, the author’s son is showing signs of separation anxiety for the very first time, clinging to his mom and dad in new or unfamiliar environments. The author points out that separation anxiety is generally taken as one of the first signs of attachmen...

This chapter describes the development of the infant in the third month of life. After being warned by her pediatrician that her son has a flat head from sleeping on his back, the author discusses the common newborn issues of plagiocephaly and torticollis, how these diagnoses became popular, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), and how back sleepin...

This chapter describes the development of the fetus in the seventh month of pregnancy. By the seventh month, the author describes how the fetus is staring to behave more and more like a newborn, and she focuses on how the fetus is capable of learning in the third trimester. She goes into an in-depth discussion of fetal learning of familiar tastes,...

This chapter describes the development of the fetus in the fourth month of pregnancy. As the author learns the sex of her own baby, she explores a discussion of gender and sex throughout development. Specifically, she addresses the development of sex organs prenatally and how biological sex should be differentiated from the construct of gender usin...

This chapter describes the development of the infant in the first month of life. The chapter is centered on the difficulties of the newborn period, focusing on postpartum depression, crying, colic, and the science behind the benefits of breastfeeding. As the author faces her own difficulties with each of these issues, she offers practical recommend...

This review challenges the traditional interpretation of infants' and young children's responses to three types of potentially "fear-inducing" stimuli-snakes and spiders, heights, and strangers. The traditional account is that these stimuli are the objects of infants' earliest developing fears. We present evidence against the traditional account, a...

This handbook offers a comprehensive review of the research on emotional development. It examines research on individual emotions, including happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust, as well as self-conscious and pro-social emotions. Chapters describe theoretical and biological foundations and address the roles of cognition and context on emoti...

Several researchers have proposed a causal relation between biased attention to threat and the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders in both children and adults. However, despite the widely-documented correlation between attention bias to threat and anxiety, developmental research in this domain is limited. In this review, we highlight t...

The current study examined the relations between individual differences in attention to emotion faces and temperamental negative affect across the first two years of life. Infant studies have noted a normative pattern of preferential attention to salient cues, particularly angry faces. A parallel literature suggests that elevated attention bias to...

Researchers have been interested in the perception of human emotional expressions for decades. Importantly, most empirical work in this domain has relied on controlled stimulus sets of adults posing for various emotional expressions. Recently, the Child Affective Facial Expression (CAFE) set was introduced to the scientific community, featuring a l...

Research has demonstrated that humans detect threatening stimuli more rapidly than non-threatening stimuli. Although the literature presumes that biases for threat should be nor-mative, present early in development, evident across multiple forms of threat, and stable across individuals, developmental work in this area is limited. Here, we examine t...

Although cognitive theories of psychopathology suggest that attention bias towards threat plays a role in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety, there is relatively little evidence regarding individual differences in the earliest development of attention bias towards threat. The current study examines attention bias towards threat during its pote...

Research suggests that humans have an attentional bias for the rapid detection of emotionally valenced stimuli, and that such a bias might be shaped by clinical psychological states. The current research extends this work to examine the relation between body dissatisfaction and an attentional bias for thin/idealized body shapes. Across two experime...

Research Findings: Anthropomorphism—the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman entities—has long been a staple of children’s media. However, children’s experiences with anthropomorphic media may interfere with biological reasoning instead encouraging an anthropocentric view of the natural world. To date, little research has addressed the...

In the current research, we sought to examine the role of spatial frequency on the detection of threat using a speeded visual search paradigm. Participants searched for threat-relevant (snakes or spiders) or non-threat-relevant (frogs or cockroaches) targets in an array of neutral (flowers or mushrooms) distracters, and we measured search performan...

While a large body of empirical research has investigated preschool-aged children’s knowledge of the natural world, comparatively little attention has been paid to the relevant cultural and social input that shapes the content and development of children’s factual knowledge and conceptual reasoning. In the current research, we experimentally examin...

Although there is a large literature on children's reasoning about contagion, there has been no empirical research on children's avoidance of contagious individuals. This study is the first to investigate whether children avoid sick individuals. Participants (4- to 7-year-old children) were invited to play with two confederates-one of whom was "sic...

Pessoa's (2013) dual competition model outlines a framework for how cognition and emotion interact at the perceptual levels and provides evidence within the field of neuroscience to support this new perspective. Here, I discuss how behavioral work fares with this new model and how visual detection is influenced by information with affective or moti...

Countless studies have reported that individuals detect threatening/angry faces faster than happy/neutral faces. Two classic views have been used to explain this phenomenon—that negative valence drives the effect, or conversely, that low-level perceptual characteristics of the stimuli are responsible for their rapid detection. In the current review...

Emotional development is one of the largest and most productive areas of psychological research. For decades, researchers have been fascinated by how humans respond to, detect, and interpret emotional facial expressions. Much of the research in this area has relied on controlled stimulus sets of adults posing various facial expressions. Here we int...

A large body of empirical research has focused on understanding children's biological knowledge development. However, limited research has investigated the informal learning experiences through which children actively construct biological concepts. The current study focused on examining whether parents provide information that supports and shapes c...

Investigators have long been interested in the human propensity for the rapid detection of threatening stimuli. However, until recently, research in this domain has focused almost exclusively on adult participants, completely ignoring the topic of threat detection over the course of development. One of the biggest reasons for the lack of developmen...

Countless studies have reported that adults detect a variety of threatening stimuli more quickly than positive or neutral stimuli. Despite speculation about what factors drive this bias in detection, very few studies have examined the exact search strategies adults use to detect threatening stimuli in visual search. The current research uses an eye...

Previous research has documented a propensity for rapid detection of various threats like snakes and spiders in human adults, children, and even infants. The current research presents a controlled, systematic investigation of the mechanisms by which humans quickly detect threat. In 3 experiments, we examine the unique and interacting roles of low-l...

Based largely on the famous "visual cliff" paradigm, conventional wisdom is that crawling infants avoid crossing the brink of a dangerous drop-off because they are afraid of heights. However, recent research suggests that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Avoidance and fear are conflated, and there is no compelling evidence to support fear of heigh...

Fear is one of our most basic emotions. It is an important social signal and alerts us to when a situation is safe or risky. Interestingly, not all fears are created equal: Several researchers have proposed that humans develop specific fears, such as fear of threatening stimuli, more readily than others. Here we discuss three major theories of fear...

In the current brief report, we examined threat perception in a group of young children who may be at-risk for anxiety due to extreme temperamental shyness. Results demonstrate specific differences in the processing of social threats: 4- to 7-year-olds in the high-shy group demonstrated a greater bias for social threats (angry faces) than did a com...

The current investigation compares the results of two commonly used visual detection paradigms-the standard adult button-press detection paradigm used in Öhman, Flykt, and Esteves (2001), and the new child-friendly touch-screen detection paradigm used in LoBue and DeLoache (2008)-within the same samples of adult participants. Results suggest that b...

Animals are important stimuli for humans, and for children in particular. In three experiments, we explored children's affinity for animals. In Experiment 1, 11- to 40-month-old children were presented with a free-play session in which they were encouraged to interact with several interesting toys and two live animals - a fish and a hamster. Experi...

Fear is one of our most salient emotions, and one that is shared among humans and nonhumans alike. Traditional and modern views of how we acquire fear suggest that it is learned through conditioning or observation. However, an interesting aspect of human fears is that they are not all created equal—some fears are more likely to be experienced than...