The impact of maternal postnatal depression on infant eye contact and social learning: a cross cultural comparison

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the impact of postnatal depression (PND) on infant’s social learning and eye gaze across cultures. Sample: The sample in this study consisted of N = 67 mother-infant dyads, from Singapore (N= 25, Mage = 11.07 months) and Cambridge, UK (N= 42, Mage = 10.88 months). Hypotheses: It is hypothesised that higher levels of PND will decrease social learning in infants. Infants of mothers with higher levels of depression, will also tend to look more often at the novel object during the social learning process. Lastly, due to the cultural differences in eye contact and emotional expressivity, it is hypothesised that eye gaze would be more effective for social learning in UK as compared to in SG. Methods: Mothers and infants at both sites performed an affective social learning task, in which infants observed their mother’s model positive and negative emotions towards a pair of novel objects, before being allowed to interact with those objects. Maternal depression scores were gathered through the EPDS and BDI-II questionnaires. Infant social learning scores were tabulated according to infant’s first touch of the novel object, while considering learning bias towards negative and positive items. Results: While findings generally did not support the hypotheses, the results revealed that infant age affected the duration of eye contact on the object and mother, during negative teaching trials in SG. Discussion: Findings did not support the hypotheses, potentially due to methodological differences and other limitations. Implications on future research are also discussed.