Poster #57 - Maternal Alexithymia Predicts Infant Responses to the Still Face Paradigm

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Developmental Psychopathology

Integrative Statement

Decades of research has indicated that maternal psychopathology has consequences for child temperament, self-regulation, and later risk for psychopathology (Goodman et al., 2011). A related literature has focused on maternal sensitive caregiving and parent-infant co-regulation as important determinants of these same child outcomes and has demonstrated that maternal psychopathology can compromise these processes (Feldman, 2007). Given that difficulties with emotion regulation are a transdiagnostic feature of many psychological disorders (Fernandez, Jazaieri, & Gross, 2016), it is surprising that few studies have examined associations between mothers’ own emotion regulation abilities and their infants’ emerging emotion regulation abilities. The current investigation examined whether one aspect of maternal emotion regulation, alexithymia (difficulty in identifying and expressing emotions; Taylor, 2000), is associated with infant negative affectivity in response to a regulatory challenge. We hypothesized that greater maternal alexithymia would be associated with increased infant negative affectivity, beyond the effects of maternal depressive symptoms. Participants were 67 mother-infant pairs from a prospective, longitudinal study of pregnancy and infant development. Mothers completed questionnaires assessing depressive symptoms (Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale; Cox, Holden & Sagovsky, 1987) and alexithymia (Toronto Alexithymia Scale; Bagby, Parker & Taylor, 1993). At 6 months postpartum, mothers and infants completed the Still Face Paradigm (Tronick et al., 1978), a widely-used behavioral assessment of infant regulatory capacities in response to variations in maternal behavior (Mesman, van Ijzendoorn, & Bakermans-Kranenburg, 2009). According to the standard protocol, mothers alternated between episodes of playing with their infants normally as they would at home and episodes of looking towards the infant and keeping a still face (i.e., not looking or smiling at, talking to, or touching the infant). The full protocol included 5 episodes (baseline play, still face, reunion play, still face, reunion play) of 2 minutes each. Infant facial negative affectivity and distress vocalizations during each of the 5 episodes were coded with a scheme adapted from the Laboratory Temperament Assessment Battery (Goldsmith & Rothbart, 1999). Composites of the two infant negative affect dimensions were created for the still face episodes and reunion episodes separately. In a multiple regression model, maternal depressive symptoms and alexithymia each uniquely predicted infant negative affectivity during still face episodes of the Still Face Paradigm. Higher maternal depressive symptoms were predictive of lower levels of infant negative affectivity, β = -.27, p = .04, whereas greater maternal alexithymia predicted higher levels of infant negative affectivity, β = .40, p = .002. Results suggest that enhanced maternal ability to identify and express emotions may promote emotionally sensitive, attuned maternal caregiving that is supportive of infants’ emerging emotion regulation abilities. More broadly, these findings highlight the importance of considering aspects of maternal emotion regulation such alexithymia when examining maternal influences on infant temperament and self-regulation.

Authors

• Mariann Howland, Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota
  Presenting Author

• Curt Sandman, Department of Psychiatry, University of California, Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author

• Laura Glynn, Crean College of Health and Behavioral Sciences; Psychology
  Non-Presenting Author