For the nearly 4 million American women who give birth annually, infant crying is a significant stressor. The transition to motherhood may be a time of neural plasticity during which the brain undergoes change supporting distress responding. Further, this normative transition may be disrupted by maternal psychological risk. However, little is known about how change in neural responding to distress unfolds over the transition to motherhood, whether psychological factors disrupt such change, and whether such brain responses impact parenting and infant adjustment. The objectives of this research are to identify (1) normative change in neural responding to infant distress over the transition to motherhood, (2) psychological factors (depressive symptoms, attachment insecurity) that disrupt such change, and (3) neural responses to distress that impact parenting and infant social and emotional adjustment. Clearer understanding of these processes is critical because infant crying can trigger maladaptive coping, abuse, and infanticide and parenting stress due to crying costs millions of dollars annually. Advancing knowledge of changes in brain responding to distress over the transition to motherhood that support parenting and infant adjustment and identifying mothers at-risk for atypical change will reduce these burdens and improve children's quality of life.
This longitudinal study over the transition to motherhood of 200 primiparous mothers and their infants will use electrophysiological measures (EEG/ERP) of neural responding to distress and observations of parenting and infant adjustment to identify psychological factors placing women at risk for atypical change in neural responding to distress over the transition to motherhood integral to parenting and infant development. A control group of nulliparous women will complete assessments of psychological risk and neural responding to distress to test expected specificity of findings to the transition to motherhood. This research will extend knowledge of the brain bases of parenting by providing the first longitudinal evidence that mothers' neural responding to distress impacts caregiving and infant adjustment and is disrupted by maternal psychological risk. Expected findings will identify the transition to motherhood as a window for intervention for mothers at-risk for disrupted neural adaptation to parenting.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
