Poster #95 - Mothers’ Perceived Partner Responsiveness Indirectly Predicts Implicit Infant Attitude Through Implicit Partner Attitude

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Family Context & Processes

Integrative Statement

Background: This study is the first to examine determinants of maternal implicit attitude. Based on the important role of perceived partner responsiveness on close relationships and attachment theory, we suggested perceived partner responsiveness as a predictor of maternal implicit attitude. We expected that partner responsiveness would be associated with maternal implicit attitude through implicit partner attitude, maternal depression and distress. Importantly, we tested our hypothesis also for maternal explicit attitude to compare maternal implicit and explicit attitude. By studying the two together, we supported the discrepancy between them as consistent with previous research (Nosek, 2007; McNulty, Olson, Meltzer, & Shaffer, 2013), more specifically we showed that maternal implicit attitude was from with maternal explicit attitude. Method: One-hundred and twenty-one mothers of 6-24 month-old infants participated in the study. All mothers in the sample were married and cohabiting with the father of their infants. Mothers completed an online survey including the questionnaires of; The Perceived Partner Responsiveness Scale (PPRS, Reis, 2006), Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS, Cox & Holden, 1987), Parental Stress Index Short Form (Abidin, 1995), and Infant Behavior Questionnaire Revised Very Short Form (IBQ-R VSF; Putnam et al., 2014) along with an implicit attitude measure: Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP; Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005). The procedure of AMP is based on priming, a prime is shown (either the partners’ name, infants’ name or a nonsense word) to participants and followed by Chinese ideographs and noise patterns. The task of the participants is to evaluate how pleasant the Chinese ideograph is, indicated as below or above average. In the procedure, participants are believed to misattribute their attitudes about the prime to the Chinese ideograph thus giving their implicit attitude about their partner and infant (Payne et al., 2013). Results: Correlations among all study variables can be seen in Table 1. A bias corrected bootstrapping model (Preacher, & Hayes, 2008) was used to test whether partner responsiveness is associated with maternal explicit and implicit attitude through depression, maternal distress and implicit partner attitude. The findings indicated that higher perceived partner responsiveness was related with more positive maternal implicit attitude through more positive implicit partner attitude (but not through lower depression or lower maternal stress) (see Figure 1). We also studied predictors of maternal explicit attitude and found that higher perceived partner responsiveness was related with more positive explicit attitude through lower maternal distress (but not through more positive implicit partner attitude or lower depression). These two significant indirect associations were still significant, after we controlled for infant age and gender that could be potential demographic covariates in our models. Conclusions: Mothers who perceived their husbands as more responsive also indicated more positive implicit attitude toward their infants through more positive implicit partner attitude and those mothers also had more positive explicit attitude toward their infants through decreased maternal distress. The study demonstrated the importance of studying precursors of maternal implicit attitude and gives promise for future studies to examine maternal implicit attitude in studying mother-child relationships and suggests implications for intervention studies and therapy settings.

Authors

• Sumeyra Yalcintas, University of Sussex
  Presenting Author

• Emre Selcuk, Middle East Technical University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alison Pike, University of Sussex
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jeremy Cone, Williams College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Gul Gunaydin, Bilkent University
  Non-Presenting Author