Infant Temperament Maternal Attributions Mood And Rumination In Predicting Maternal Problem Solving And Mother Infant Bonding In The Postnatal Period

Author : Berenice Anaya
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (136 download)

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Download or read book The Neural Foundations of Emotion Regulation in Infancy and the Role of Individual and Environmental Factors Over Time written by Berenice Anaya and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emotion regulation encompasses the ability to monitor, evaluate, and modify our emotional reactions to accomplish current and future goals, and it is critical for socioemotional competence. A large body of research has been dedicated to tracking behavioral manifestations of emotion regulation during infancy. However, we know little about how neural systems involved in emotion regulation emerge and change during this period, and how individual and environmental factors may influence these neural systems over time. Here, I wished to advance this literature by modeling infant neural function and infant temperament over time. Specifically, I modeled the development of delta-beta coupling between 8 and 24 months, a neural correlate previously associated with emotion regulation. Additionally, I modeled trajectories of infant temperamental negative affect, which capture early predispositions for emotion regulation difficulties, as a function of infants' functional network organization. Finally, I examined these relations in the context of maternal anxiety and mother-infant interactions to investigate the role of early environmental factors. In Study 1, I tested how trajectories of delta-beta coupling varied as a function of average and fluctuating levels of infant negative affect and maternal anxiety. Here, I found that extreme patterns of infant negative affect were related to delta-beta decoupling. In the context of maternal anxiety, I also found that infant delta-beta coupling increased when mothers fluctuated above usual anxiety levels, but sharply decreased with higher and stable maternal anxiety levels. In Study 2, I examined the relation between maternal anxiety levels and infant network topological metrics and tested whether infant network metrics interacted with maternal anxiety levels to predict trajectories of infant negative affect. I found that higher maternal anxiety levels at 4 months predicted lower infant network centrality and higher distance at 8 months, a pattern that may reflect a shift in infants' networks away from typical characteristics and towards a random topology. Additionally, the growth rate of infant negative affect was substantially higher than that of the prototypical infant at extremely high levels of modularity (~ 5 community clusters), and these brain-temperament associations were exacerbated in the context of higher and fluctuating levels of maternal anxiety over time. Finally, in Study 3, I modeled mother-infant behavioral and affective exchanges using dyadic analysis and tested how dyadic measures of adaptive attractor strength and variability were associated with infant network metrics concurrently, and with delta-beta coupling over time. I found that higher behavioral dyadic variability was associated with lower network centrality and shorter distance, a pattern reflecting more random-like network topology. Additionally, I found that weaker adaptive attractor strength in mother-infant affect was associated with heightened Central delta-beta coupling at 8 months, while weaker attractor strength in mother-infant behavior was associated with a sharp decrease in Parietal delta-beta coupling that reached uncoupled levels by 15 months. Together, these findings indicate that infant temperament and maternal anxiety are concurrently and longitudinally associated with systematic differences in infant brain organization and delta-beta coupling trajectories during infancy. Furthermore, this research is among the first to capture how dyadic patterns of mother-infant behavioral and affective exchanges predict infant neural function that may underlie emotion regulation development. Throughout the three studies, I discuss these findings in light of the interactive specialization model of brain development and the role that individual and environmental factors play in promoting neurodevelopment.