Perinatal Symposium 1: NEW DIRECTIONS IN MATERNAL NEURAL RESPONDING TO INFANTS RESEARCH
Parents’ processing of infant cues (e.g., infant emotional expressions, vocalizations) is expected to shape their caregiving behaviors. Event-related potentials (ERPs), derived from electroencephalography (EEG), are particularly valuable to investigating neural processing of salient infant cues in expectant and postpartum women with their high temporal sensitivity in measuring the magnitude and efficiency of infant cue processing, resonating with the intuitive nature of parenting. Given the cost effectiveness and ease of implementation, EEG/ERP is also advantageous for large-scale studies of parenting to ensure more reliable and replicable results. Although EEG/ERP research has demonstrated that infant emotional faces are prioritized across early and late stages of processing, questions remain regarding the maternal factors that shape variation in women’s neural responding to infant emotional faces, and in turn, child development. The proposed symposium comprises four presentations that capture new directions in maternal EEG/ERP research designed to address these gaps and identify targets for parenting interventions. In this symposium, a brief primer on EEG/ERP will be provided as part of the introduction to the speakers and overview of the symposium. The first two presentations clarify the role of psychological risk factors on (expectant) mothers’ ERPs to infant emotional expressions. In the first presentation, Kristin Bernard, PhD, will discuss the importance of mothers’ own early attachment experiences in shaping neural processing of infant cues in 81 mothers, highlighting the importance of incorporating multiple assessments of early attachment experiences in contextualizing findings. Building on this work, in the second presentation, Tingyan Liu, BS, will showcase the value of moving beyond one variable of psychological risk to considering the unique contributions of depression and attachment insecurity to maternal neural processing of infant cues in a sample of 200 pregnant women. In recognizing that an important goal of maternal brain research more broadly is to inform understanding of child development, the second two presentations demonstrate the downstream significance of mothers’ neural processing of emotional expressions for children’s development. In the third presentation, Sarah Peoples, MSc, employs a novel approach to considering neural synchrony in face processing between 139 mothers and their infants, and demonstrates that how synchrony is related to infant internalizing symptoms depends on mothers’ symptomatology. Finally, in the fourth presentation, Kathryn Wall, MPhil, will present data for the first time linking maternal neural responses to infant cues with infant developmental outcomes in 94 mother-infant dyads. Taken together, these studies showcase innovation in the application of EEG/ERP to study psychological processes contributing to maternal neural processing of infant cues and the significance for child development.
