Effects of induced maternal stress on the mother, infant, and dyad

University Of Massachusetts Boston, Dorchester MA

Investigators

Abstract

The quality of infants' social experiences over the course of development affects most aspects of their developing self. One of the biggest contributors to infant social experience is the mother. This is especially true in coping with stressful situations. Mothers' ability to regulate their own emotions and behaviors in stressful situations influences infants' ability to regulate their own stress reactions. This project aims to explore this relationship by introducing a moderate stressor experimentally to both mothers and their infants. Of interest is how maternal stress affects maternal self-regulation, infants' regulation, and the subsequent interaction between the two. To address this question, 160 mother-infant dyads will be randomly assigned to one of two stress conditions, maternal stress or non-stress. To begin, all dyads will first participate in typical face-to-face play to assess individuals' and dyads' baseline behavior and physiology. Next, depending upon condition, mothers will hear either infant distress cries (maternal stressor) or positive vocalizations. Then, infants will be stressed using a standard approach called the Face-to-Face Still-Face paradigm in which the adult remains still and non-reactive while facing the infant. This project will assess whether the induced maternal stress predicts maternal, infant, and dyadic stress reactions during and following the infant stressor. Raising a child in today's fast-paced and often chaotic society can prove daunting for most mothers. This project will introduce a reliable, innovative approach to manipulating maternal stress in an effort to better understand differences in maternal stress regulation. Results from this project will better inform intervention strategies by helping to identify mothers who are more vulnerable to stress and who, as a result, engage in less healthy stress regulation interactions with their infants thereby compromising the infant's capacity for healthy emotion regulation and social development.