Poster #146 - Maternal Childhood Adversity and OXTR Genotype Impact on Responses to Infant Crying as a function of Cognitive Load

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Integrative Statement

Infant crying typically motivates parents to care for them (Soltis, 2004). However, infant crying has been seen to be aversive stimuli and require emotional regulation to ensure flexible parenting. Maternal childhood adversity can have negative parenting ability consequences (Buisman et al., 2018; Casanova, Domanic, McCanne, & Milner, 1994). However, Isumi & Fujiwara (2016) found that maternal childhood adversity was not associated with shaking or smothering a 4 month old infant when they cried. To elucidate the individual differences associated with the effects of maternal childhood adversity, in this study, we focused on a gene-by-environment approach. Variations in oxytocin receptor gene polymorphism (OXTR) rs53576 may indicate a different susceptibility to the long-term effects of childhood experiences on the neural and social phenotypes, which seems to suggest that people with the OXTR G allele, who have suffered childhood trauma, may have trouble processing social stimuli such as infant’s negative cues and as a result fail to regulate their own emotions. Furthermore, recent studies have highlighted the importance of intra-individual variations in parenting situations (Hiraoka & Nomura, 2016; Probst et al., 2017). Recognizing a child’s emotional cues and providing adaptive caregiving requires the ability to regulate emotions (Rilling, 2013); however, the cognitive resources associated with emotional regulation are limited and people who have low trait emotional regulation skills have been found to be susceptible to situational cognitive stress (Dvorak & Simons, 2009). This study examined the three-way interaction between maternal childhood trauma, OXTR, and situational cognitive load on handgrip force and subjective feelings while hearing an infant crying.
In the current study, 124 mothers (35.32 ± 4.22 years old) participated in a standardized infant vocalization paradigm. Participants were asked to squeeze a handgrip dynamometer at maximal and half strength (e.g. Crouch, Skowronski, Milner, & Harris, 2008) while memorizing a meaningless alphabet syllable as the cognitive load manipulation and listening to an infant crying. Subjective intentions in response to the crying infant were rated at the conclusion of each infant crying. The Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (Bernstein et al., 2003) was used to assess the participants history of childhood adversity. Participants were genotyped for the rs53576 polymorphism.
It was found that the situational cognitive load was associated with increased levels of excessive handgrip force which is the indicator of maladaptive parenting. Significant three-way interaction was also observed. Mothers who had experienced childhood trauma and had the OXTR G allele were vulnerable to situational load and had a more excessive handgrip force in response to a crying infant. Additionally, participants with the OXTR G allele and higher childhood adversity reported a lower intention to provide care. Given that maternal responses to crying infants predict the child’s attachment representations (Bell & Ainsworth, 1972), the maternal behavioral and subjective feelings toward infant crying shown in the current study will influence the parenting style of the next generations. Therefore, these findings have significant implications for understanding the mechanisms shaping maladaptive parenting styles and the intergenerational transmission of child abuse.

Authors

• Daiki Hiraoka, Kyoto University
  Presenting Author

• Michio Nomura, Kyoto University
  Non-Presenting Author