Maternal sensitivity in interactions with their 2-month-old infants in Rio de Janeiro - Brazil

Abstract

This paper reports on a study of maternal sensitivity in 22 primiparous women and their infants from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Sociodemographic risk was assessed through an interview, and videotaped naturalistic home observations were used to assess maternal sensitivity, and its relation with warmth, verbal and physical engagement, and camera awareness. A K-means cluster analysis was performed to examine patterns of risk in relation to maternal sensitivity. Compared to the 15 mothers with higher sensitivity scores, the seven mothers with lower sensitivity scores were characterized by lower educational levels, lower income, lower age, slum residence, unplanned and unwanted pregnancies, and later onset of prenatal care. Whether father was resident did not appear to distinguish between the lower and higher sensitivity groups. The pattern of social-contextual risk for Brazilian mothers showing less sensitive caregiving to their infants provide direction for future research in this cultural context.

Using video observation in the family context: The association between camera‐related behaviors and parental sensitivity

“…Ideally, future studies relying on video observation would routinely measure CRB and camera awareness themselves to establish its potential effect on observational measures. When microcoding or in-depth interviews are too time-intensive, at the very least the macro-coding of CRB should be feasible, and relations between those macro-coded results and variables of interest ought to be tested, as done by Alsarhi et al (2021), Lima Ribeiro et al (2021. Follow-up surveys regarding camera awareness and reactivity are also easily accessible and useful, as it has been frequently used in research in medical contexts (Themessl-Huber et al, 2008), and are able to measure camera awareness directly, rather than having to rely on its expression in the form of CRB.…”

“…Within family contexts, a handful of studies have investigated the nature and predictors of CRB in parents and children. Studies in several non-Western countries video coded the CRB of mothers using a 3-point global coding scheme and found the percentage of mothers who display CRB to vary strongly between countries (Alsarhi et al, 2021;Asanjarani et al, 2021;Fourment et al, 2021;Lima Ribeiro et al, 2021;Mesman et al, 2021;Rahma et al, 2021). Children's CRB have been found to occur frequently (Barriage & Searles, 2019).…”

“…Research using semi-structured in-depth interviews with parents and questionnaires has found strong evidence for observer and camera reactivity, with parents reporting their and their children's behavior to change (Bennetts et al, 2017;Russell et al, 1992;Thornberry, 2013). Some of the studies that video-coded mothers' CRB in non-Western contexts associated these with parental sensitivity, and found no associations (Alsarhi et al, 2021;Lima Ribeiro et al, 2021;Rahma et al, 2021). The discrepancy between the outcomes of these selfreport and observational methods could be because the latter used a very rough measure of CRB, namely a 3-point scale for the whole video, thereby making it unlikely to find more nuanced effects.…”

Attachment, Mentalizing and Trauma: Then (1992) and Now (2022)

“…Thus, caregiver sensitivity fosters the capacity for social learning and adaptation across cultures. A series of studies from 2020 demonstrated the cross-cultural relevance of caregiver sensitivity by showing that it could be reliably identified in interactions in different cultures in Yemen [ 121 ], Iran [ 122 ], South Africa [ 123 ], Peru [ 124 ], Kenya [ 125 ], Indonesia [ 126 ] and Brazil [ 127 ].…”