The Neurobehavioral and Social-Emotional Development of Infants and Children (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) by Ed Tronick

Author:Ed Tronick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 23

Making Up Is Hard to Do, Especially for Mothers With High Levels of Depressive Symptoms and Their Infant Sons

The goal of this chapter is to describe the interactions of mothers with normative or high levels of depressive symptoms and their 3-month-old infants. The study focuses on maternal and infant affective expressiveness as well as on the dyadic processes that link both partners’ affect together. These processes have been seen in the literature as reflecting interactive qualities such as the mutuality, attunement, or harmony of the mothers’ and infants’ interactions (Brazelton, Koslowski, & Main, 1974; Stern, Hofer, Haft, & Dore, 1985). Although successful mutual regulation of affect is critical to children’s socioemotional development (Shore, 1994; Tronick, 1989), little is known about the factors that influence these processes during early infancy. Therefore, this study evaluates the effects of maternal depressive symptom status, infant gender, and variations in interactional context on mother-infant affective expressiveness and the dyadic features of their interactions.

The study is guided by the mutual regulation model (MRM), which provides a theoretical framework for understanding how mothers and infants shape their interactions moment by moment (Tronick, 1989; Tronick & Weinberg, 1997). The MRM stipulates that mothers and infants form a dyadic system in which they jointly and actively regulate their interactions by responding to each other’s affective and behavioral displays. The success or failure of this mutual regulation process depends on the infants’ and the mothers’ ability to regulate their own homeostatic, affective, and behavioral states and their capacity to interpret and respond to each other’s affect and behavior. These abilities are often limited in the young infant, and a caregiver’s sensitive scaffolding is required for the infant to successfully modulate arousal and emotional states. Specifically, the caregiver’s ability to interpret and respond appropriately and sensitively to the infant’s communications facilitates the infant’s regulation, achievement of goals, and interpersonal functioning.

Relatively few studies have evaluated dyadic features in mother-infant interactions. While evaluation of infant and maternal affect provides a picture of each partner’s affective expressiveness, dyadic measures refer to the degree to which the mother and infant coordinate their affective or behavioral states and reflect what the mother and baby are doing together. Dyadic processes have been defined in a number of different ways in the literature. Studies have focused on mothers’ and infants’ ability to change affective or behavioral states in temporal coordination with one another (synchrony), to share the lead in the interaction (bidirectionality), and to share joint affective or behavioral states at the same moment in time (matching; Beebe & Lachmann, 1994; Cohn & Tronick, 1987; Feldman, Greenbaum, & Yirmiya, 1999; Jaffe, Beebe, Feldstein, Crown, & Jasnow, 2001; Malatesta & Haviland, 1982; Tronick & Cohn, 1989; Weinberg, Tronick, Cohn, & Olson, 1999).

Research using nonclinical samples indicates that infant affective expressiveness and mother-infant dyadic processes vary as a function of gender. Weinberg et al. (1999) found that male infants have more difficulty maintaining affective regulation than female infants and that female infants use looking at objects as an effective means of self-regulation.

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