Six-week postpartum maternal self-criticism and dependency and 4-month mother-infant self- and interactive contingencies.

Abstract

Associations of 6-week postpartum maternal self-criticism and dependency with 4-month mother-infant self- and interactive contingencies during face-to-face play were investigated in 126 dyads. Infant and mother face, gaze, touch, and vocal quality were coded second by second from split-screen videotape. Self- and interactive contingencies were defined as auto- and lagged cross-correlation, respectively, using multilevel time-series models. Statistical significance was defined as p<.05. Regarding self-contingency, (a) more self-critical mothers showed primarily lowered self-contingency, whereas their infants showed both lowered and heightened, and (b) infants of more dependent mothers showed primarily lowered self-contingency, whereas findings were absent in mothers. Regarding interactive contingency, (a) more self-critical mothers showed lowered attention and emotion contingencies but heightened contingent touch coordination with infant touch, and (b) more dependent mothers and their infants showed heightened facial/vocal interactive contingencies. Thus, maternal self-criticism and dependency have different effects on mother-infant communication.

Six‐week postpartum maternal depressive symptoms and 4‐month mother–infant self‐ and interactive contingency

“…With maternal depression, selfcontingency was lowered for mothers and infants. This is an important finding, consistent with Beebe et al (2007). Lower self-contingency makes it harder for each individual to anticipate one's own and the partner's ongoing behavioral stream.…”

“…Hane, Feldstein, and Dernetz (2003) found that midrange vocal coordination was related to higher maternal sensitivity at 4 months. Beebe et al (2007) found that 6-week self-criticism was associated at 4 months with heightened maternal interactive contingencies (in some modalities) and lowered (in others); but self-contingency was lowered.…”

“…Because the prior probability of error is greatest for the extreme parameters, this method tends to pull in such extremes. Advantages of this approach include: (a) Multiple time-series (in our case, self-and interactive contingency) can be modeled simultaneously, (b) an average effect of key parameters (e.g., infant behavior contingent on mother behavior) is estimated for the group and allows the investigator to ask how that group mean changes in the context of other factors such as maternal depression, (c) control variables and their conditional effects can be included as necessary, (d) nonlinear relations can be examined in the same analyses, and (e) more appropriate statistical model assumptions are made (see Beebe et al, 2007). 6 A "random effect" is the term used for identifying the differences in a variable (function, or association) among study participants.…”

“…Each person must both monitor the partner and regulate inner state, and either or both may be misregulated in each partner (Beebe et al, 2007;Gianino & Tronick, 1988). Rather than locating the source of difficulty in one or the other partner (e.g., infant self-regulatory difficulties or maternal insensitivity), we pry apart the relative contributions of self-and interactive regulation of both partners.…”

Systematic empirical investigation of vulnerability to postpartum depression from a psychodynamic perspective: Commentary on issues raised by Blum (2007).

“…From a clinical perspective, in treatment one might seek to augment the dependent mother's ability to experience feelings of love toward her baby, feelings that could function as a buffer in a period of suffering and pain. Self-critical mothers, in contrast, seem to need assistance in overcoming their inability to experience feelings of love because of their feelings of guilt, shame, and anger-feelings that contribute to their tendency to disengage from their infant and from their sources of interpersonal support because of their avoidant coping style (Beebe et al, 2007).…”