Poster #33 - High quality social environment buffers infants’ cognitive development from poor maternal mental health: Evidence from a study in Bhutan

• In Event: Poster Session 05

Abstract

Poor maternal mental health negatively impacts cognitive development from infancy to childhood, affecting both behavior and brain architecture. In a non-western context (Thimphu, Bhutan), we demonstrate that culturally-moderated factors such as family, community social support, and enrichment may buffer and scaffold the development of infant cognition when maternal mental health is poor. We used an eye-tracking based, visual-search task with two difficulty levels to measure early building blocks of cognition: attention regulation and social perception, in 9-month old Bhutanese infants (N = 121). On easy trials, a single target appears on the screen, and infants receive a reward when they fixate on the target. On difficult trials, the target is among four identical distractors that are different from the target. Search efficiency, an index of attention regulation, was measured as the search time required to fixate on the target in the difficult compared to the easy trials. Each visual search trial was preceded by the presentation of an emotional face (happy, angry, fear, and control). By measuring how social perception (i.e., the face) preceding the search, impacted search efficiency, the task thus allowed us to simultaneously assess social perception and attention regulation in the same paradigm. In our measure of maternal mental health, we included: a) Postnatal depression symptoms using the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (Cox et al., 1987), b) Post-traumatic stress symptoms using the PTSD Checklist-Civilian version (PCL-C) (Weathers et al., 1993), and c) maternal negative mood states using the negative subscale of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) (Watson et al., 1988). Our measure of social environment included included a) total number of household members, b) number of social gatherings attended monthly (Mott, 2004), c) frequency of storytime reading/telling (Mott, 2004), d) number of people can count on, loves me, and helps me (Mott, 2004), and e) maternal positive mood states using the positive subscale Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS).
We used Linear Mixed-Effects Modeling (LMM) with restricted estimation maximum likelihood (REML) criterion to analyze relations among maternal mental health, Social Environment, and Visual Attention. The cognitive development of Bhutanese infants in richer social environments was buffered from poor maternal mental health, while for infants in environments with lower rates of protective social environment factors, worse maternal mental health significantly predicted greater costs for infant attention, a fundamental building block cognition. Our findings extend previous related work, and uniquely highlight that family, community social support and enrichment may buffer and support attention regulation and social perception when maternal mental health is poor. These results have far-reaching practical implications in that they suggest that practitioners and stakeholders now have several cultural tools in the form of community (e.g., social gatherings, public pre-school programs) and family (e.g., parent education) interventions at their disposal to buffer against the negative consequences of poor maternal mental health on cognitive development. International policies and interventions geared to improve maternal mental health and child health outcomes should incorporate each regions’ unique family, cultural, and community support structures.

Authors

• Joshua Juvrud, Uppsala universitet
  Presenting Author

• Sara Haas, Uppsala universitet

• Marcus Lindskog

• Kim Astor, Uppsala universitet

• Sangay C Namgyel

• Tshering Wangmo

• Kinzang P Tshering

• Gustaf Gredebäck, Uppsala universitet