The affective behaviors symptomatic of the depressed adult are variously expressed in the parent role. How they are expressed by the mother and experienced and responded to by the child are the focus of this project. To be considered, also, is the fact that the child's affective expression, although a response to maternal interaction. The naturalistic laboratory paradigm (MH-02144) is the source of data. Measures of affect include: (a) a minute-by- minute rating of emotions and moods of mother and child, (b) a detailed accounting of physical touch and affection, and (c) an experimental intervention in which depressed affect is elicited from the mother in response to a standard stimulus and the subsequent mother-child interaction is recorded. Analyses are at various stages for these several sets of affective data. Among the findings are: The overall exposure of children to expressed negative mood or emotion of the mother is 17%, 11%, and 6% interaction time with unipolar, bipolar, and normal mothers, respectively. These mean percentages far underestimate the variability related to maternal diagnoses. There are extremes in the depressed groups in which 80 to 90% of the minutes are coded in negative affect. High frequencies on negative affect in the children (the outliers) tend also to be in the offspring of depressed mothers. Children of the unipolar mothers, more than other children, become involved in the mothers's sadness. In such interactions the young child's empathy for the mother and his/her caregiving responses appear to be exploited. Affect and touch were investigated in the interchange of mothers and their 2 to 3 year olds. Touch is initiated more often by the mother (75% of the occurrences) than the child. The major functions of mothers; touch is to monitor and regulate child behavior and to give affection. The young child's initiations of touch are predominantly to be physically close to (in contact with, leaning on) the mother
