How does atypical emotional reactivity in mothers with depressive symptoms affect social learning between mothers and their infant?

Abstract

This study aims to investigate how does atypical emotional reactivity in mothers with depressive symptoms affect social learning between mothers and their infant. Emotional reactivity refers to the differing levels of emotional response one has towards an event. Specifically, this study looks at affective social referencing which refers to affective communication between individuals that allows for the social interpretation of a situation. 16 mother-infants dyads performed a social learning task. Firstly, infants observed their mother displaying positive or negative emotional expressions towards a pair of novel objects. After which, infants freely interacted with the objects while their mothers kept a neutral facial expression. The behaviors and emotional reactivity of mothers and infants were manually coded. Emotional reactivity of mothers during structured and unstructured mother-infant interactions were coded separately. Increased maternal mood scores predicted lower positive emotional reactivity scores in mothers, but a positive trend was found with negative emotional reactivity scores during unstructured interactions. Unexpectedly, maternal mood scores and infant’s emotional reactivity were found to be positively correlated. Out of the two performance indices (learning bias and learning score), learning bias produced the strongest correlation with emotional reactivity. Positive emotional reactivity scores have a nonsignificant positive correlation with learning scores, but a significant negative relationship was found between learning bias and positive emotional reactivity scores during structured interaction. The limitations and theoretical implications for future research are also discussed in this paper.