Maternal depression and anxiety, social synchrony, and infant regulation of negative and positive emotions.

Abstract

Maternal postpartum depression (PPD) exerts long-term negative effects on infants; yet the mechanisms by which PPD disrupts emotional development are not fully clear. Utilizing an extreme-case design, 971 women reported symptoms of depression and anxiety following childbirth and 215 high and low on depressive symptomatology reported again at 6 months. Of these, mothers diagnosed with major depressive disorder (n = 22), anxiety disorders (n = 19), and controls (n = 59) were visited at 9 months. Mother-infant interaction was microcoded for maternal and infant's social behavior and synchrony. Infant negative and positive emotional expression and self-regulation were tested in 4 emotion-eliciting paradigms: anger with mother, anger with stranger, joy with mother, and joy with stranger. Infants of depressed mothers displayed less social gaze and more gaze aversion. Gaze and touch synchrony were lowest for depressed mothers, highest for anxious mothers, and midlevel among controls. Infants of control and anxious mothers expressed less negative affect with mother compared with stranger; however, maternal presence failed to buffer negative affect in the depressed group. Maternal depression chronicity predicted increased self-regulatory behavior during joy episodes, and touch synchrony moderated the effects of PPD on infant self-regulation. Findings describe subtle microlevel processes by which maternal depression across the postpartum year disrupts the development of infant emotion regulation and suggest that diminished social synchrony, low differentiation of attachment and nonattachment contexts, and increased self-regulation during positive moments may chart pathways for the cross-generational transfer of emotional maladjustment from depressed mothers to their infants. (PsycINFO Database Record

Maternal and infant characteristics connected to shared pleasure in dyadic interaction

“…Previous research has linked child positive affectivity to both positive and negative outcomes, and in their review, Davis and Suveg () suggested that it might moderate the relationships between contextual factors and indices of child adjustment and maladjustment. A link between low levels or a lack of child positive affectivity and an increased risk for later depression has emerged in many studies, particularly in families where parents have depressive disorders (Olino et al., ; Granat, Gadassi, Gilboa‐Schechtman, & Feldman, ). In our study, 29% of the mother–infant dyads did not have SP in the 5‐min time period.…”

Maternal depression impacts child psychopathology across the first decade of life: Oxytocin and synchrony as markers of resilience

“…Studies point to disruptions in mother–child synchrony in cases of maternal depression in infancy (Beebe et al., ; Granat et al., ; Weinberg & Tronick, ), but we are aware of no study that measured synchrony in relation to maternal depression beyond infancy. Since synchrony is longitudinally linked with children's externalizing and internalizing problems, it is possible that the experience of synchrony may help to promote resilience in the context of maternal depression.…”

Bio-behavioral synchrony promotes the development of conceptualized emotions

“…In cases of insufficient maternal regulation, the optimal developmental trajectory shifts to place infants at risk of psychopathology [56]. It was recently demonstrated that mothers who suffer from post-partum depression are less synchronous with their infants, and such reduced social synchrony disrupts the infant’s emotion regulation *[57]. The authors suggested that compromised regulation of emotion is behaviorally transferred from the depressed mother to her infant.…”