Researchers observed mother–infant interactions in urban UK and rural Ugandan communities, focussing on how mothers soothed their babies following naturally occurring episodes of distress.
They found that although the UK mothers responded to their babies' distress more quickly, Ugandan infants actually recovered faster.
This challenges long-standing assumptions rooted in Western models of parenting by showing that maternal promptness is not the only factor influencing how infants manage their emotions.
Instead, the type of soothing behaviour used, which is shaped by cultural context, may play a key role in helping babies regulate distress.
While both UK and Ugandan mothers soothed their babies at 3 months with tactile contact, like breastfeeding, UK mothers tended to use more verbal reassurance and less tactile contact as babies grew older.
By comparison, Ugandan mothers were more likely to rely on tactile strategies, particularly breastfeeding, even with older infants.
The research has been published in the journal Developmental Psychology.
It was led by Dr Carlo Vreden of the DIPF Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, Germany, and Professor Zanna Clay of the Department of Psychology, Durham University, UK.
Dr Vreden said: "Our findings show that maternal responsiveness is universally important.
"But how mothers respond, and the effectiveness of their strategies, varies in meaningful ways between cultures.
"Importantly, we are not making value judgments about which approach is better.
"Rather, we are highlighting that caregiving strategies are shaped by culture.
"It is not just about how quickly the mothers respond to their babies, but also the type of maternal soothing response which plays a crucial role in infant emotion regulation."
Researchers analysed 147 naturally occurring episodes of infant distress involving 82 infants aged three and six months.
In both countries, infants recovered more quickly when mothers responded faster.
But notably, Ugandan mothers - who tended to respond more slowly - soothed their infants more effectively using tactile strategies, like breastfeeding, leading to quicker recovery.
This effect appears to stem from cultural differences in caregiving style and suggests that soothing methods may be more influential than speed of response alone.
Professor Clay said: "Most of what we know about babies' early emotional development is based on studies conducted in Europe and North America.
"But of course, these Western settings don't reflect the caregiving environments experienced by the majority of infants around the world, nor how they may have been historically.
"We wanted to explore how maternal sensitivity plays out in a more diverse global context.
"Uganda is an interesting place to study caregiving, as infants are typically cared for multiple different caregivers and their styles of caregiving culturally differ, such as prioritising more physical contact with their babies."
Unlike controlled lab settings or surveys, the observations in this study reflect genuine, everyday spontaneous parent–infant interactions.
The researchers hope these insights will inform more culturally inclusive approaches to parenting support and early intervention.
Professor Clay said: "Our study also highlights the balance between responding to your baby while also having to manage daily tasks, which can be more challenging in rural low-resource setting
"For example, we think one of the reasons the Ugandan mothers may have reacted slower is that they were often engaged in outdoor physical work such as tending to crops."
Dr Vreden said: "We've shown that Western ideas about optimal parenting don't always apply in other settings.
"Even though the UK mums do seem to follow this sort of gold standard of responding as soon as possible, it's the Ugandan children who don't get that quicker response who actually recovered faster.
"This emphasises the complexity of different strategies working in different ways and in different settings."
The researchers say that further work in this field could include experimental studies to isolate the effects of specific maternal behaviours, expanding the study across more cultural contexts, and exploring how early caregiving influences children's emotional development later in life.
The study was funded by the European Research Council.
