Depressed mothers’ infants show less negative affect during non-contingent interactions
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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Cited by (20)
Prenatal maternal depression predicts neural maturation and negative emotion in infants
2023, Infant Behavior and DevelopmentEmpathy during early Childhood Across Cultures, Development of
2015, International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences: Second EditionThe Still-Face Paradigm and bidirectionality: Associations with maternal sensitivity, self-esteem and infant emotional reactivity
2014, Infant Behavior and DevelopmentCitation Excerpt :The body of work conducted by Field and colleagues described maternal depression influences both in maternal behaviors in the SFP as well as infant reactivity during and post-still face (Field et al., 1986, 2007). Specifically, infants of depressed mothers show greater physiological reactivity to the still-face, yet less interactive behaviors and more neutral affect in play interactions with their mothers (Field et al., 2005, 2007). Additionally, a review by Weinberg and Tronick (1998) reported that infants of depressed mothers are less likely to engage in sustained eye gaze and have more problems regulating their physiological and emotional states.
Subclinical levels of maternal depression and infant sensitivity to social contingency
2013, Infant Behavior and DevelopmentCitation Excerpt :If infants of mothers with higher depressive symptoms are sensitive to shifts in social contingency, we would expect that the infants would respond equally to both replay sequences. Second, the mothers were naive with respect to the experimental manipulation, unlike the mothers in both Field et al. (2005) and Nadel et al. (2005), who were informed in advance that the infants would be presented with a replay of their behavior during the experiment. We would like to argue that not disclosing the experimental manipulation would provide valuable information on how infants respond to shifts between contingent and non-contingent interaction that resembles naturally occurring interaction and processes of repair in a more ecologically valid manner.
Discrimination of facial expression by 5-month-old infants of nondepressed and clinically depressed mothers
2011, Infant Behavior and DevelopmentCitation Excerpt :In this respect, infants of depressed mothers have systematically different social experiences than do infants of nondepressed mothers (Field, 1995). Although they show similar levels of gazing at and vocalizing to their infants as nondepressed mothers (Field et al., 2005), depressed mothers tend to smile less and interact with their infants in a withdrawn and muted style (Cohn, Matias, Tronick, Connell, & Lyons-Ruth, 1986; Field et al., 1985; Field, Diego, & Hernandez-Reif, 2009; Field, 1992). Thus, infants and children of clinically depressed mothers experience an atypical emotional environment characterized by disproportionately high levels of exposure to sad, angry, or neutral facial expressions compared to other infants (Dawson et al., 2003).