Conducting new analyses of decades-old videotapes of mother-infant interactions, a group of Canadian researchers from Concordia University have come up with a similar conclusion as the original scientist studying the tapes more than 30 years ago: depressed moms appear to spend more time in mismatched emotional states with their infants than do moms who are not depressed.
The recent findings, first-authored by a group of researchers from Montreal in the journal Infancy, add a fresh scientific corroboration of the results of a study of mother-infant interactions conducted by March of Dimes scientist Dr. Tiffany Field, a University of Miami psychologist focused on interactions between moms and infants.
Dr. Field is also widely recognized for her work on the beneficial effect of human touch on a myriad of conditions, including preventing prematurity and enhancing the growth and development of preterm infants.
In 1990, Dr. Field invited a group of Miami moms, some of whom were depressed, and their 3-4-month-old infants, to participate in a videotaped study that recorded how they interacted following two scenarios. The first was a short ‘still face’ scenario where the mom looked at the infant with a neutral facial expression, and the second was a separation scenario, where the mom briefly hid behind a curtain in the same room as the infant before returning. While Dr. Field noted the infants’ reactions during both scenarios, the crux of the study rested in the nature of the ‘reunion’ interactions between the pairs following the two scenarios. During the reunion, the pairs were instructed to play and express emotion freely.
Dr. Field coded and rated each of the 48 mother-infant pairs on a ‘synchrony’ scale that assessed how much time they spent in matching behavior states. She then compared the results to a questionnaire the moms filled out about their mental health and saw a link between depressed moms and a tougher time achieving emotional synchrony with their infants. The work was published in Developmental Psychology, the journal of the American Psychological Association.
“Once we lined up the data, the conclusion was clear,” said Dr. Field. “Depressed mothers had more trouble than those who were not depressed in being on the same emotional page as their infants.”
Thirty-four years later, Elizabeth Leong, a psychology PhD student from Montreal’s Concordia University, and Dr. Dale Stack, a psychology professor at the same university, along with several other authors, reaffirmed Dr. Field’s findings while also broadening the mother-infant interaction dynamics examined by applying a new coding and analysis system.
Instead of using Dr. Field’s concept of ‘synchrony’ to denote parallel emotional states, the Canadian team looked at mother-infant ‘co-regulation’ using Dr. Alan Fogel and colleagues’ Revised Relational Coding System. According to this coding system, co-regulation is based on simultaneous behaviors by moms and infants that result in varied states of mutual attentiveness and engagement. They also paid careful attention, as did Dr. Field, to the infants’ reactions to the mom’s absence and lack of emotion during the two scenarios. Specifically, the Montreal researchers looked at how much the infants vocalized distress through cries, whimpers, and whines.
Their analysis, of 40 mother-infant pairs out of Dr. Field’s 48 original pairs, netted a similar conclusion to Dr. Field’s: they found that depressed moms and their infants had more unilateral exchanges (where one is engaged and the other is not, for example), than non-depressed moms and their infants during the reunion scenario following the separation and still face procedures.
They also found that the co-regulation of moms and infants in the depressed group was less disrupted by the still face scenario, possibly because those infants had experience with their mom’s neutral facial expression and had grown more accustomed to it than the infants of those who were not depressed, Dr. Field said.
“With science, you always need to revisit it to see if it still holds true, so it’s incredibly gratifying that Dr. Dale Stack’s team breathed new life into this rich dataset,” said Dr. Field. “And whether you look at synchrony or co-regulation, it’s clear that maternal depression makes it tougher to achieve.”
Dr. Field’s previous research has shown that infants of moms who remain depressed until the infant is 6 months of age are at higher risk of developing a depressed style of interacting with others. In contrast, infants of moms who were not depressed and maintained co-regulation, or synchrony with the infant, are at lower risk of developing a depressed style of interacting with others.