Infant Neurodevelopment and Maternal Sensitivity to Infant Distress: Relations with Emotion Regulation in 6-Month-Old Infants

• In Event: 1-126 - Infants and Their Caregivers in Concert: Developmental Perspectives on Interpersonal Neurophysiology and Behavior

Integrative Statement

Early interactions among infants and their caregivers shape an infant’s developing socioemotional competencies The period from birth to two years of age is critical in the development of emotion regulation (ER; Kopp 1989), attachment (Bowlby, 1969), and neural development (Casey et al., 2000). Indeed, it is during this earliest period of development that the infant brain is likely most vulnerable to external insults resulting in potential regulatory deficits (Davidson & McEwen, 2012), or, alternatively, receptive to positive nurturing which may buffer negative influences.
Dyadic parent-child interactions are influential in an infant’s development. A major component of such interactions is mothers’ sensitivity to infants’ cues, which is relatively stable across time (Behrens et al., 2012). For example, increased maternal sensitivity to infant distress predicts subsequent emotional well-being in the infant (Leerkes et al., 2012); these early interactions can alter infant brain structure, with adverse caregiving influencing later neural circuitry and volume (Gee et al., 2013). Thus, we would expect maternal sensitivity in early infancy to impact infant brain development and behavior.
Mothers (N=64) were recruited during pregnancy and infants underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at one month. Data were fit to a diffusion tensor model to examine the fractional anisotropy (FA), a measure of white matter microstructure, of early developing white matter tracts. Infant motor regulation and maternal sensitivity were assessed at 6 months during the reunion episode of the Still Face Paradigm (SFP; Tronick et al., 1978). All analyses controlled for infant gestational age and sex.
Select findings indicate that both maternal sensitivity and infant motor regulation were significantly related to increased FA in the right posterior limb of the internal capsule and the right uncinate fasciculus. Additionally, maternal sensitivity was significantly related to increased FA in the left anterior and posterior corona radiata, and infant motor regulation was significantly related to increased FA in the left superior corona radiata. See Table 1 for all significant correlation coefficients and p-values.
The internal capsule and corona radiata project to the basal ganglia, a region associated with voluntary motor movements, habit learning, and emotion, forming an anatomic link between cognitive and motor systems in the cortex (Gage & Baars, 2018). The uncinate fasciculus is a white matter tract connecting temporal structures such as the amygdala, a limbic projection of the basal ganglia, to frontal regions (Olson et al., 2015). Increased FA reflects more developed white matter; significant positive relations with maternal sensitivity and effective motor regulation indicate that maternal sensitivity may impact white matter development as early as 1 month of age, which in turn influences behavioral development; thus, further analyses will examine how maternal sensitivity may moderate relations between infant neural and emotional development.

Authors

• Kristin Dowe, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Presenting Author

• Elizabeth Planalp, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Author

• Douglas Dean, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Author

• Hill Goldsmith, UW-Madison
  Non-Presenting Author

• Richard Davidson, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Author