Reciprocal face-to-face communication between rhesus macaque mothers and their newborn infants

Ferrari, PF, Paukner, A ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3421-1864, Ionica, C and Suomi, SJ, 2009. Reciprocal face-to-face communication between rhesus macaque mothers and their newborn infants. Current Biology, 19 (20), pp. 1768-1772. ISSN 0960-9822

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Abstract

Human mothers interact emotionally with their newborns through exaggerated facial expressions, speech, mutual gaze, and body contact, a capacity that has long been considered uniquely human (1–4). Current developmental psychological theories propose that this pattern of mother-infant exchange promotes the regulation of infant emotions (4–6) and serves as a precursor of more complex forms of social exchange including perspective-taking and empathy. Here we report that in rhesus macaques, mother-infant pairs also communicate intersubjectively using complex forms of emotional exchanges including exaggerated lipsmacking, sustained mutual gaze, mouth-mouth contacts, and neonatal imitation. Infant macaques solicit their mother’s affiliative responses and actively communicate to her. However, this form of communication disappears within the infant’s first month of life. Our data challenge the view that the mother-infant communicative system functions in order to sustain proximity and that infants are simply passive recipients in such interaction. Thus, emotional communication between mother and infant is not uniquely human. Instead, we can trace back to macaques the evolutionary foundation of those behaviors that are crucial for the establishment of a functional capacity to socially exchange with others.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Current Biology
Creators:	Ferrari, P.F., Paukner, A., Ionica, C. and Suomi, S.J.
Publisher:	Elsevier
Date:	3 November 2009
Volume:	19
Number:	20
ISSN:	0960-9822
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1016/j.cub.2009.08.055 DOI S0960-9822(09)01690-X Publisher Item Identifier 1427764 Other
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	29 Mar 2021 09:51
Last Modified:	31 May 2021 15:05
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/42616

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