By Aaron Miller-
A study showing how mothers calm their distressed infants with soothing signals in the fields of pediatrics and behavioral neuroscience has been used to determine the effectiveness of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) in helping mothers suffering with depression calm down their infant children.
CBT addresses the interconnectedness thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, and actions are interconnected, and that negative thoughts and feelings can trap you in a vicious cycle.
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CBT aims to help individuals with overwhelming problems in a more positive way by breaking them down into smaller parts.
You’re shown how to change these negative patterns to improve the way you feel.
An estimated 20 % of mothers who have given birth suffer from post-partum depression (PPD), PPD is a complex mix of physical, emotional, and behavioral changes that happen in some women after giving birth
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“Myriad studies have shown that mothers with postpartum depression struggle calming their distressed babies,” according to John Krzeczkowski,(pictured) a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology and with the LaMarsh Centre for Child and Youth Research. “However, it is not known how mothers’ soothing signals are transmitted to their baby, how postpartum depression disrupts this process, or if treating depressed mothers can alter these signals.”
Krzeczkowski – the lead author of “Follow the leader: Maternal transmission of physiological regulatory support to distressed infants in real-time,” has been published today in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science.
Krzeczkowski’s team included professors of behavioural neuroscience . One of her colleagues, Louis A. Schmidt worked with two sets of mother-infant pairs: in the control group to assess the finding of their investigation.. In one group, both mothers and babies were healthy; in the other group, the mothers had received a PPD diagnosis within a year of giving birth.
The methodology of the study examined how the mothers and babies responded to three phases of interaction. It is useful in assessing the efficacy of soothing techniques . In the play phase, mothers played with their infants in their routine pattern, involving stalking, touching, and in some cases, singing.
The still-face phase required mothers not to touch or speak to their babies, but only to maintain eye contact and adopt an expressionless “poker” face, so that the infant would become distressed and agitated. The final reunion phase was the focus of the study. Mothers were permitted to re-engage with their now-distressed infants as they did in the play phase.
Throughout the phases, the team monitored both mother and baby for a heart-rate variability measure called respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA)- a known indicator of a one’s emotional state. In the reunion phase, the researchers carefully observed the readings for evidence of a “feedback loop” of reciprocal heart-rate signals passing between mother and baby.
The groups were tested twice. The first time was to establish a baseline and then a second time, several weeks later, after the mothers with PPD had received, and been observed to benefit from, a course of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), improving their affective state.
In the healthy control group, Krzeczkowski’s team found that mothers’ heart-rate changes, as measured through RSA readings, preceded those of infants, suggesting that they were leading what Krzeczkowski calls the “soothing dance.”
Conversely, in the PPD-afflicted group, it was the infants whose physiological signals led the dance. But after CBT treatment, the PPD mothers’ physiological signalling improved such that they led the back-and-forth, just as the healthy mothers had.
Krzeczkowski says these results represent a breakthrough in what has long been a blind spot in behavioural neuroscience.
“This study demonstrates empirically, for the first time, that synchronized physiology between mothers and babies plays a role in soothing distressed infants, and that treating PPD with CBT can improve the synchronicity patterns and thereby augment mothers’ ability to soothe their distressed babies.”
“So we now know a bit more than we ever did before about how soothing signals are transmitted in real time on a moment-to-moment scale between mothers and infants.”
The paper calls for future studies to test whether improvement in the RSA feedback loop’s soothing effects can be casually linked to CBT treatment of PPD-suffering mothers.
“Because of our study’s observational design,” Krzeczkowski says, “we can’t stay categorically that positive changes were specifically due to CBT treatment. The two are correlated but there could be confounding factors—for example, the specific methods that individual mother use to calm their babies, like singing, talking and touch. But we want more people to get treatment for PPD. We hope that by showing causality and efficacy, it can increase the idea that these programs can benefit them.”
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