Maternal Emotion Regulation and Responding to Infant Distress

• In Event: 2-078 - Affective and Cognitive Aspects of Parental Self-Regulation in Early Parenting

Integrative Statement

Introduction. The capacity to regulate emotions is critical to social interactions, including interactions between parents and their children. When caring for distressed and dysregulated infants, maternal emotion regulation is of particular importance to optimize caregiving interactions and promote infant health and well-being. However, we know surprisingly little regarding maternal emotion regulation. Here we examined maternal self-reported usage of two emotion regulation strategies: cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. We sought to understand whether adopting these strategies would be associated with the length of time taken to behaviorally respond to infant distress. Given prior associations reported between emotion regulation and working memory in parents and non-parents, as an exploratory analysis, we also measured maternal working memory and examined it associations with emotion regulation and responding to infant distress.
Hypotheses. We hypothesized that higher levels of cognitive reappraisal and lower levels of expressive suppression would be associated with faster behavioral responses to infant cues of distress. We also anticipated that maternal working memory would be associated with maternal emotion regulation, consistent with previous research.
Methods. Our community-based sample consisted of 71 mothers (mean age = 28 years; 33 primiparous) who completed the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Gross & John, 2003). We employed the baby simulator (BSIM) paradigm to measure how long mothers took to respond to infant distress (Rutherford, Goldberg, Luyten, Bridgett, & Mayes, 2013). The BSIM paradigm consists of an infant simulator which is computer-controlled to cry. Infant simulators allow the standardization of infant cries, ethical sensitivity in modelling infant distress, and ecological validity in experimental laboratory settings. To measure working memory, we employed a computerized n-back task (Cogstate Ltd).
Results. In regression analyses, controlling for maternal demographics, we found that mothers who reported higher usage of cognitive reappraisal strategies (β =.26) took longer to approach and pick-up the infant simulator, F(1,59)=5.96, p=.02. By contrast, we found no association between maternal usage of expressive suppression and pick-up times for the infant simulator. Working memory (β =.29) and maternal age (β =.27) predicted cognitive reappraisal, F(1,59) = 5.96, p = .02; however, working memory was only weakly associated with time taken to respond to infant distress.
Discussion. These findings (1) replicate prior work evidencing associations between working memory and emotion regulation; and (2) demonstrate that maternal cognitive reappraisal predicts responses to infant distress. One interpretation of our findings is that cognitive reappraisal may require more effort during emotionally-charged caregiving interactions, lengthening the time taken to respond to infant distress. Further research is required to investigate this notion. Nevertheless, these findings indicate the importance of measuring maternal emotion regulation empirically to further understand the role of this critical capacity to caregiving and child development and well-being.

Authors

• Helena JV Rutherford, Yale Child Study Center
  Presenting Author

• Rachel Martin, Yale Child Study Center
  Non-Presenting Author

• David Bridgett, Northern Illinois University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Linda C Mayes, Yale Child Study Center
  Non-Presenting Author