Year: 2020

How does maternal odor impact infants’ responses to emotional faces?

First results from our project on the impact of maternal odor on emotion processing in infancy are out!

Testing 7-month-olds in an EEG paradigm, we found that infants at this age show a reduced fear response when they can smell their mother. This suggests that maternal odor might be a strong enough signal to make the baby feel safe and reduce their need to pay increased attention to potential threats in the environment. We also found that breastfeeding might have a similar effect – while babies who were not breastfed any more showed the expected attentional response to fearful faces, this response was absent in breastfed babies.

Jessen, S. (2020). Maternal odor reduces the neural response to fearful faces in human infants. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 45, 100858.

Changes in the lab due to Corona pandemic

The safety of our participants, their family and our lab members is our top priority.

Therefore we strictly follow the safety guidelines for measurements developed by the University of Lübeck in times of Corona.

Specifically, this means:

  • All measurements at the lab take place following the current 2G+ guidelines, meaning that all adults coming to the lab must either be fully vaccinated or recovered from COVID-19 and additionally provide a current official COVID-19 test result unless they have received a booster shot. We will check this upon arrival in the lab. All lab members are also fully vaccinated and boostered.
  • On the day before the measurement, we will contact you by phone to go through a specific checklist to make sure no participant shows any potential symptoms associated with COVID-19. We will go through the same list again upon arrival in the lab.
  • All lab members wear FFP2-masks at all times when in contact with participant, and we also ask parents to wear an FFP2-mask.
  • All rooms are well ventilated and all materials are disinfected regularly.
  • We ask you to bring your own toys. Currently we are unable to provide toys for your infant because of hygienic standards.
  • If possible, one parent only should come with the infant; in particular, please don’t bring any other persons who are not members of your household along (hence, second parent and siblings are okay).

If you decide to participate in our experiment, we will discuss these guidelines again in detail on the phone and address any further questions you might have.