Depressed mothers’ infants show less negative affect during non-contingent interactions

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Abstract

Infants of depressed and non-depressed mothers were videotaped interacting with their mothers in the [Nadel, J., Carchon, I., Kervella, C., Marcelli, D., & Reserbat-Plantey, D. (1999). Report: Expectancies for social contingency in 2-month-olds. Developmental Science, 2, 164–173] paradigm which consists of three segments including: (1) a free play, contingent interaction, (2) a non-contingent replay of the mothers’ behavior that had been videotaped during the first segment, and (3) a return to a free play, contingent interaction. As compared to infants of non-depressed mothers, infants of depressed mothers showed less negative change (less increase in frowning) in their behavior during the non-contingent replay segment. This finding was interpreted as the infants of depressed mothers being more accustomed to non-contingent behavior in their mothers, thus experiencing less violation of expectancy in this situation.

Section snippets

Participants

Sixteen depressed and 16 non-depressed mothers and their 2-month-old infants participated in the study (M = 8.1 weeks, R = 7–9 weeks for infants of depressed mothers and M = 7.9 weeks, R = 7–9 weeks for the infants of non-depressed mothers). The mothers were recruited at the neonatal nursery until 16 depressed mothers could be indentified (approximately 40% mothers being depressed at this stage). The mothers were low-to-middle socioeconomic status and were distributed 47% Hispanic, 32% African American

Mother behaviors

ANOVAs followed by post hoc Bonferroni t tests for interaction effects on the mothers’ behaviors (i.e., gazing at infant, smiling, and vocalizing) across the contingent conditions (live1 and live2) revealed the following (see Fig. 1): (1) the mothers’ gazing at infant and vocalizing behaviors did not change across the two segments; (2) the mothers’ smiling decreased during the live2 segment but only for the non-depressed mothers (t = 2.38, p < .05); and (3) the depressed mothers smiled during a

Discussion

These results suggest that very young infants are sensitive to social contingency and expect adults to produce socially contingent responses during face-to-face interactions. This expectancy appeared to exist for both the infants of depressed and non-depressed mothers as manifested by a decrease in gazing at mother during the non-contingent replay condition. The infants of depressed mothers, however, while showing at least some recognition of non-contingent behaviors in their mothers by gazing

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the mothers and infants who participated in this study. This research was supported by an NIMH merit award (MH#46586) and an NIMH Senior Research Scientist Award (MH#00331) to Tiffany Field and funding by Johnson and Johnson.

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