Poster #10 - Authoritarian style relates to changes in neural synchrony between mothers and infants across the Still-Face paradigm

• In Event: Poster Session 09

Abstract

An infant looks to their mother during moments of uncertainty, a process known as social referencing, which serves as a tool to regulate their own emotions. During these times, the infant may mirror their behavior and emotions off of their mother and modulate to match. Thus, an infant’s emotional and social development is in part contingent on learning the emotional signals and physiological balance expressed by their mothers. The still-face paradigm is a classic task that disrupts this process, in which a mother switches from playing with their infant to being non-responsive to their infant’s behaviors. During baseline, mothers are instructed to interact with their child as they typically would. After baseline, the mothers are instructed to have a flat affect. Finally, the mothers are instructed to interact with their infant again in the recovery phase. Each phase lasts two minutes. In this study, we explored mother-infant neural synchrony in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) during the still-face paradigm as a metric of neural coordination within the dyad.
We asked whether these dyadic patterns between mother and infant related to parenting style. Studies often focus on four parenting styles: authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, and uninvolved. Authoritarian parenting is characterized by high control and low responsiveness. Authoritarian parenting styles have been linked to emotional dysregulation as well as internalizing or externalizing problems. We hypothesized that dyads with mothers higher on authoritarian parenting would have lower neural synchrony in the PFC, particularly during the recovery phase of the modified still-face paradigm as compared to the baseline phase.
We relied on a sample of 13 infant-mother dyads (Minfant age = 7.27 months, 7 female). Mothers were asked to complete the Parental Authority Questionnaire (PAQ) which yields a continuous measure for each parenting style (authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, uninvolved), reflecting the degree to which the mother’s behaviors align with each parenting style. The PAQ gives scenario based questions that asks mothers how they would react if it happened to their child in the future. Wavelet transform coherence was used to examine synchrony in the fNIRS data between homologous mother and infant optodes. Optodes were collapsed into left and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Difference scores between the baseline and recovery period, before and after the Still Face, were then calculated for each region of interest. We examined associations between authoritarian parenting and the difference scores for neural synchrony in the dlPFC and mPFC. Although data collection is ongoing, preliminary findings indicate a significant positive association between authoritarian parenting and difference score for the right dlPFC, b = 59.80, p = .03, such that increases in mother-infant neural synchrony from baseline to recovery were higher when mothers reported higher levels of authoritative parenting. We found a similar positive association between authoritarian parenting and the left dlPFC b = 36.48, p = .07, at trend. This may suggest that neural synchrony plays a larger role in reconnecting mother and infant in the context of a more rigid parenting style.

Authors

• Morgan E Jones, Pennsylvania State University, University Park
  Presenting Author

• Kelley E Gunther, Yale University

• Berenice Anaya, Pennsylvania State University, University Park

• Christina Olena Hlutkowsky, The Pennsylvania State University

• Koraly Elisa Perez-Edgar, Pennsylvania State University, University Park