Maternal stress and the Development of infant regulatory processes

honors thesisCollege of Social & Behavioral SciencePsychologyElisabeth ConradtWhen mother-infant dyads engage in an effective form of communication, one where mother and infant both play an active role, the infant gains an understanding for the emotions that they feel. However, acute stress exposure may challenge the dyad's ability to effectively self-regulate prior to and following a social stressor. According to stress contagion theory, stress can be passed on from mother to infant during social interactions. Through an experimental manipulation of maternal stress, the current study examined relations between maternal stress and infant emotion regulation. The purpose of this study was to determine whether a stressed mother may "transmit" stress to her infant, thus causing infant physiological dysregulation. Forty mother-infant dyads were assessed in the laboratory, using the Still Face Paradigm (SFP), to examine this relationship. Forty mother-infant dyads participated. Infants were examined at 7 months of age, and mothers ranged from 21-38 years old. We were successful in creating a stress response in infants. However, we did not see differences in infant physiological responses between the stress group and the control group, indicating that we were not able to create two significantly different groups. We did see differences in infant heart rate during the second recovery episode of the SFP, where mothers are allowed to interact with their infants after 2 minutes of not responding. Contrary to our hypothesis, we found that mothers exposed to a stressor prior to the SFP had infants with shorter recovery times compared to unexposed mother infant dyads