Bidirectional Influences Among Mother-Child Dyads: Exploring Child-Directed Effects Across Multiple Timescales

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Despite strong theorizing of bidirectional relations among maternal and child mental health throughout the first few years of life, empirical support has primarily been amassed by the collection of studies that have demonstrated unidirectional effects of maternal emotional dysregulation on child functioning, with less empirical attention paid to the effects of child characteristics on maternal emotion regulation and parenting behavior. This symposium includes three papers that explore child-directed effects on maternal mental health, emotion regulation, and behavior within a bidirectional framework. Our data draws upon diverse studies of mother-child dyads using multi-method approaches (e.g., maternal report, observed behavior), across multiple timescales (e.g., across infancy and preschool, across the course of a mother-child interaction, second-by-second transaction), and statistically-innovative approaches to assess within-dyad processes. The first paper offers a temporally-fine-grained perspective to bidirectional mother-child interactions during infancy, evaluating mother- and infant-driven emotion co-regulatory processes as they unfold second-by-second during playful interactions. The second paper considers the effect of observed child negativity on increases in observed maternal negativity across the course of a challenging mother-child interaction task during preschool. Lastly, the third paper evaluates bidirectional, within-dyad transactions among maternal depressive symptoms and child behavior problems throughout the first four years of life, providing longitudinal evidence of child-directed effects of child behavior problems on subsequent maternal depressive symptoms during infancy and preschool. Discussion will foster a more nuanced understanding of bidirectional transactions among mother-child dyads during the first few years of life, future directions for empirical work, and implications for prevention and intervention.

Sub Unit

• Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Chair

• Sarah Gianna Curci, Arizona State University

Discussant

• Danielle Roubinov, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Individual Presentations

• Effect of Prenatal Depressive Symptoms on Dynamic Mother and Infant Emotion Regulation and Coregulation Processes - Presenting Author: Jennifer Anne Somers, University of California - Los Angeles; Non-Presenting Author: Linda J. Luecken, Arizona State University

• Preschooler Negativity Predicts Increased Maternal Negativity for Dyads in Which Mothers Have Borderline Personality Disorder - Presenting Author: Angela H. Lee, University of Oregon; Non-Presenting Author: Bryan Mantell, University of Oregon; Non-Presenting Author: Stephanie Stepp, University of Pittsburgh; Non-Presenting Author: Maureen Zalewski, University of Oregon

• Within-Dyad Bidirectional Relations Among Maternal Depressive Symptoms and Child Behavior Problems from Infancy Through Preschool - Presenting Author: Sarah Gianna Curci, Arizona State University; Non-Presenting Author: Jennifer Anne Somers, University of California - Los Angeles; Non-Presenting Author: Laura K. Winstone-Weide, University of Texas at Austin; Non-Presenting Author: Linda J. Luecken, Arizona State University