Poster #21 - Maternal Depression Relates to Infant EEG Coherence Changes Across Social and Non-Social Conditions.

• In Event: 2-163 - Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Section - Biological Processes: Psychophysiology

Integrative Statement

Background: Maternal psychopathology hinders infants’ neurophysiological and socioemotional development. Particularly, maternal depression during the first months of infancy relates to patterns of neural activation associated with poor social functioning in later stages of infancy (Wen et al., 2017) and childhood (Jones, Field, & Almeida, 2009). Infants’ brains show different activation patterns under social and nonsocial conditions (St. John et al., 2016), which may reflect the developing capacity to neurally adapt to situational demands. However, it is unknown whether the ability to make these context-related shifts is contingent on infants’ early environment, particularly maternal psychopathology. EEG coherence indicates functional connectivity: lower levels of coherence between widely separated neural regions reflect increased regional specialization (Silberstein et al., 2004; Thatcher et al., 2005). This study investigated whether maternal depression when infants were 6 months old was related to lower EEG intrahemispheric coherence in social contexts than in non-social contexts when infants were 12 months old.
Methods: Participants included 45 mother-infant dyads (22 female infants). We assessed maternal depression when infants were 6 months old (infants’ age M=6.67 months, SD=.42; mothers’ age M=32.82 years, SD=4.26) with the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D). Using a clinical threshold cutoff, we dichotomized mothers’ CES-D scores into depressed and non-depressed groups. At 12 months old (M= 12.10 months, SD=.74) we recorded infants’ EEG across a nonsocial condition and a social joint attention condition. During the nonsocial condition, infants looked at two screens showing identical nonsocial objects while the experimenter was hidden behind a curtain. During the social joint attention condition, the experimenter was face-to-face with the infant and directed the infant’s attention to the pictures while commenting on them. For each condition, we computed 6-9 Hz within-hemisphere EEG coherence pairings of frontal regions to temporal, parietal, and occipital regions.
Results: We conducted a Repeated Measures Analysis of Variance (RM-ANOVA) with frontal-to-posterior EEG coherence as the dependent measure; region, hemisphere, and condition as within-subjects factors; and maternal depression as the between-subjects factor. We found no main effects, but an interaction of condition, depression, and region (F(1,35)=12.97, p=.001). Follow-up RM-ANOVAs indicated that infants of non-depressed mothers showed differences in EEG coherence between social and nonsocial conditions in the frontal-central (F(1,35)=11.56, p=.002), frontal-temporal (F(1,35)=10.66, p=.002), and frontal-occipital (F(1,35)=13.342, p=.001) coherence pairings, showing lower coherence during the social joint attention condition. Infants of depressed mothers showed no differences between conditions in any region.
Discussion: For infants of depressed mothers, EEG frontal-to-posterior coherence did not change between nonsocial and social joint attention conditions; infants of non-depressed mothers showed lower coherence during the social condition in nearly all coherence pairings, reflecting increased regional specialization for social contexts. Thus, maternal depression at six months predicted impairments in infants’ ability to neurally adapt to social situational demands at twelve months. It is possible mothers who are depressed are less socially engaged and less able to respond contingently to their infants, hindering infants’ ability to adapt neurally to social contexts. Future research should examine how specific parenting characteristics in depressed mothers relate to this phenomenon.

Authors

• Diana Lopera-Perez, Boston University
  Presenting Author

• Giulia Stangier, Boston University, Philipps-Universitaet Marburg
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ashley M St. John, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Srishti Nayak, Princeton University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Philip G Grieve, Columbia University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Amanda Tarullo, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author