A Multi-Systemic, Person-Centered Analysis of Maternal Stress Physiology in Relation to Maternal Sensitivity

• In Event: Biobehavioral influences of environmental stress and caregiving behaviors on child outcomes

Abstract

Maternal sensitivity, defined as prompt caregiving responses that are contingent upon the infants’ needs (Ainsworth et al., 1978), has been a key construct in infant research because of its distinct ability to predict individual differences in children’s attachment (Ainsworth et al., 1978; De Wolf & van IJzendoorn, 1997). Mounting research efforts have examined the psychosocial concomitants of maternal sensitivity (e.g., Leerkes, 2010; Neuhauser, 2018); however, the physiological underpinnings of maternal sensitivity are less understood and warrant further investigation.
Probably not surprisingly, caregiving environments can be fraught with stress-inducing stimuli, such as infant distress, and activate mothers’ stress response system (SRS), which primarily consists of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Previous research has provided evidence for the association between maternal caregiving behavior and activation patterns of the SNS (e.g., Out et al., 2012; Reijman et al., 2014), and the HPA axis (e.g., Blair et al., 2007; Finegood et al., 2016), respectively. Given the functional connectivity between the SNS and HPA axis (Chrousos & Gold, 1992), the current study aimed to examine the activation patterns of the SNS and the HPA axis simultaneously, as well as their links to maternal sensitivity in a context of infant distress (i.e., the arm restraint procedure, ARP; Goldsmith & Rothbart, 1999), using a person-centered analytical method. Inspired by the evidence that chronic contextual adversities can alter the functioning of the SRS (Cohen et al., 2006; Evans & English, 2002), which in turn impairs mothers’ caregiving responses (Sturge-Apple et al., 2011), the current study included the examination of potential links between SRS activation and contextual risk factors (i.e., mothers’ economic status and levels of exposure to community violence).
Method
Participants included 228 mothers (39% Black, 21.9% White, 17.1% Latinx; annual household income: 48.7% < $10,000, $10,001< 23.2%< $30,000) and their 6-month old infants. Maternal sensitivity variables were coded on a scale of 1 (less sensitive) to 5 (highly sensitive) using the NICHD Early Child Care Research Network (1999) coding system, which was also utilized to code infant distress. Salivary alpha-amylase (sAA) and salivary cortisol (sCor) were assayed and indexed, respectively, the activation of the SNS and HPA axis in response to infant distress elicited by the ARP. Mothers’ exposure to community violence was assessed using the Exposure to Violence scale (ETV; Kindlon et al., 1996; Brennan et al., 2007).
Analysis Plan
All data collection has been completed. To identify patterns of mothers’ stress reactivity, a latent profile analysis (Williams & Kibowsky, 2016) will be conducted using Mplus (Muthén & Muthén, 1998-2015), with full-information maximum likelihood algorithm to handle missing data. Homogenous subgroups of mothers are expected to emerge based on mothers’ change scores in sAA and sCor post-task. Once the best-fitting model is determined through examinations of fit indices, covariates (i.e., infant distress, income and exposure to community violence) will be added to the model. Finally, the BCH method suggested by Asparouhov and Muthén (2018) will be used to estimate and compare means of maternal sensitivity outcomes across those emerged latent profiles.

Authors

• Chenchen Dai, Lehigh University
  Presenting Author

• Susan Soledad Woodhouse, Lehigh University
  Non-Presenting Author