Associations Between Maternal Affect, Infant Gaze Aversion and EEG Asymmetry in Infants of Mothers at Risk for Perinatal Depression Open Access
Huang, Binhong (Spring 2019)
Abstract
With researchers interpreting infants’ gaze aversion as an emotion regulation strategy, we examined the association between maternal affect and infant gaze aversion to gain a better understanding of the development of emotion regulation. We hypothesized that infants were more likely to gaze away when the mothers showed flat or sad affect than positive affect. Additionally, because depression in mothers has been shown to be associated with a variety of adverse effects on children and infants’ attentional biases to affective stimuli, we sampled mothers at elevated risk for perinatal depression and examined the association between postpartum depression in mothers and infant gaze aversion at 3- and 6-months of age. We hypothesized that mothers’ depressive symptoms would be correlated to infant gaze aversion during mothers’ flat or sad affect, and that the strength of such association would be stronger in the 6-month data than the 3-month data. Moreover, in order to further understand infant gaze aversion to mothers’ emotion expressions, we also examined infants’ EEG frontal asymmetry to infer their emotional valences. We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between infant gaze aversion and relative right frontal EEG asymmetry, and that depression in mothers would be a moderator in this relationship. The results showed that relative to mothers’ positive affect, infants were significantly more likely to gaze away during mothers’ flat affect, and significantly less likely to gaze away during mothers’ sad affect. And mothers’ depressive symptom levels were not significantly associated with infant gaze aversion during either mothers’ flat or sad affect at either 3- or 6-months. In the 3-month group, EEG asymmetry was significantly correlated to infant gaze aversion during mothers’ flat and sad affect combined, and flat affect alone, albeit not significant at 6-months. There was no significant association between EEG asymmetry and infant gaze aversion during mothers’ sad affect at either time-point. And depression in mothers did not significantly moderate the relationship between EEG asymmetry and infant gaze aversion. Limitations, strengths and important future steps are discussed.
Table of Contents
Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………….….1
Current Study…………………………………………………………...............................6
Method…………………………………………………………………………...….……….……9
Participants……………………………………………………………………………..….9
Procedure…………………………………………………………………………….........9
Measures…………………………………………………………………………….…...10
Data Analytic Strategy…………………………………………………………………...15
Results……………………………………………………………………………………………16
Preliminary Analyses and Descriptive Statistics………………………………………...16
Hypothesis Testing……………………………………………………………………....17
Discussion…………………………………………………………………………………….….20
Limitations & Strengths……………………………………………………………….....24
Future Directions………………………………………………………………………...26
References…………………………………………………………………………………….….27
Tables…………………………………………………………………………………………….34
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