Interactive coordination of currently depressed inpatient mothers and their infants during the postpartum period

Abstract

In healthy mother-infant dyads, interactions are characterized by a pattern of matching and mismatching interactive states with quick reparation of mismatches into matches. In contrast, dyads in which mothers have postpartum depression show impaired mother-infant interaction patterns over the first few months of the infant's life. The majority of studies that have examined such interaction patterns have drawn on community samples rather than on depressed inpatient samples of mothers who were in a state of current depression at the time of assessment. To date, no study has investigated specific microanalytic patterns of interactive coordination between depressed German mothers and their infants using the Face-to-Face Still-Face paradigm (FFSF). The primary goal of this study was to evaluate specific patterns of dyadic coordination and the capacity for repairing states of miscoordination in an inpatient sample of postpartum currently depressed mothers and their infants as compared with a healthy control group. A sample of 28 depressed inpatient German mothers and their infants (age range = 1-8 months, M age = 4.06 months) and 34 healthy dyads (range = 1-8 months, M age = 3.89 months) were videotaped while engaging in the FFSF. A focus was placed on the play and reunion episodes. Compared with healthy dyads, dyads with depressed mothers showed less coordination of positive matched states and longer latencies when repairing interactive mismatching states into positive matched states. Clinical implications are discussed.

Effects of Maternal Anxiety Disorders on Infant Self-Comforting Behaviors: The Role of Maternal Bonding, Infant Gender and Age

“…This was κ = 0.73 for the infant codes and κ = 0.78 for the maternal codes. Thus, the interrater reliability of our study coders was similar to those reported in previous studies [24,51]. …”

“…They were not aware which videos were used for assessing coding reliability. In accordance with other studies [24,51], we used Cohen's κ [52] to compute interrater reliability. This was κ = 0.73 for the infant codes and κ = 0.78 for the maternal codes.…”

“…Previous research on risk factors for infant development found a negative impact of maternal depression [17,18] and anxiety [19,20] and has focused on maternal sensitivity [21,22] and mother-infant interaction [23,24]. Recently, Dalsant et al [25] demonstrated that parental bonding moderated later stress response to social stimuli in the adult offspring.…”

Influence of Dyadic Matching of Affect on Infant Self-Regulation

“…The participants of this study were recruited in the course of a larger longitudinal investigation of mother-infant dyads at the psychiatric University Hospital Heidelberg from September 2001 till November 2006 [for further details, see [24]. The current study included data from the first set of data collection and comprises a sample of 68 mother-infant dyads.…”

“…Withdrawn and intrusive interaction styles often exhibited by depressed mothers were found to be associated with adverse infant outcomes, such as a generalized disengaged and passive affectivity and self-regulatory style as well as insecure attachment styles [19,20,21,22,23]. Mother-infant matching can be hampered by maternal depression [22,23,24]. However, findings are inconsistent.…”