Attention to Negative Facial Expressions, Maternal Postpartum Depression, and Attachment Quality in Infancy

• In Event: 2-189 - Internal Working Models in the Making? Attachment and Social Information Processing During Early Development

Integrative Statement

Introduction: The ability to process emotional signals is essential for understanding others’ emotions and intentions. From the first hours of life, infants take part in daily repeated face-to-face interactions with their primary caregiver(s), including coordinated interactions of facial affect (Beebe & Steele, 2013). The nature and quality of these interactions are believed to modulate the development of infants’ socio-emotional processing abilities (Dykas & Cassidy, 2011), particularly their perception of emotional facial expressions (Aktar & Bögel, 2017).
Previous research has independently identified maternal postpartum depression (PPD; e.g., Forssman et al., 2014) and infant-mother attachment quality (Peltola et al., 2015) as correlates of infants’ processing of negative emotional facial expressions. However, to our knowledge, no previous study has examined whether attachment quality mediates the association between maternal PPD and infant perception of negative emotions.
In the present study, we therefore investigated associations between maternal PPD, infant-mother attachment quality and infants’ attention to negative emotional facial expressions. We expected that higher levels of maternal PPD symptoms and lower attachment security would be associated with less attention to negative emotions. We also hypothesized that the presumed association between maternal PPD and attention to negative emotions would be mediated by attachment quality.
Methods: 118 children and their families participated in this longitudinal project. Measures: Maternal depressive symptoms were assessed with the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS; Cox, Holden, & Sagovsky, 1987) at 6 weeks and 6 months and combined into an average measure. Infant-mother attachment quality was assessed using the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP; Ainsworth et al., 1978) when the infant was 12 months of age. We used the attachment security scale as our primary outcome variable from this assessment. Infants’ relative attention to facial expression of negative emotions (see Figure 1) was assessed with an eye tracking based visual preference paradigm at 10 and 18 months of age.
Results: Correlational analyses showed that higher levels of maternal PPD symptoms were associated with less attention to negative emotions at 18 months (r = -.27, p = .011) and that lower attachment security scores were associated less attention to negative emotions at 10 (r = .23, p = .030) and 18 (r = .28, p = .007) months. A mediation analysis indicated a significant mediation effect of attachment security score on the effects of maternal PPD on 18-month-olds’ attention to negative emotions, B = -.06 (SE = .04; 95% CI = -.151 to -.001).
Conclusions: In line with previous work we found significant correlates between maternal PPD and attachment quality with infants’ processing of negative emotional facial expressions. Importantly, this study provides the first evidence that infant-mother attachment security mediates the association between maternal postpartum depression and infants’ attention to negative emotions. Specifically, our findings indicated that higher symptom levels of maternal PPD are linked with difficulties in the infant-mother attachment, as indexed by lower attachment security scores, which indirectly influence infants’ emotion processing, as manifested in less attention to negative emotional facial expressions.

Authors

• Linda Forssman, Uppsala University
  Presenting Author

• Mari Fransson, Uppsala University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Gustaf Gredebäck, Uppsala University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Marcus Lindskog, Uppsala University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Anne Tharner, Department of Clinical Child and family Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ben Kenward, Oxford Brookes University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alkistis Skalkidou, 4Department of Women's and Children's Health, Uppsala University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Carin Marciszko, Uppsala University
  Non-Presenting Author