Academic Unit of Psychiatry, Cotham House, Cotham Hill, Bristol, UK.
Arch Womens Ment Health. 2011 Feb;14(1):23-31. doi: 10.1007/s00737-010-0180-4. Epub 2010 Sep 22.
The mother-infant relationship has an important influence on maternal mental health and infant development. Evidence suggests that this relationship is enhanced by a mother's sensitive response towards her infant's distress. We proposed that attentional processing of infant distress may indicate individual differences in this response. Research also suggests that maternal responses develop during pregnancy. We therefore hypothesised that more sensitive attentional processing of distressed infant stimuli during late pregnancy will be associated with more successful mother-infant relationships. Healthy pregnant women were recruited through community midwives. An established computerised paradigm measured women's ability to disengage attention from distressed or non-distressed infant faces. From this paradigm, we derived an index of women's attentional bias towards infant distress. Mother-infant relationships were measured using the postpartum bonding questionnaire (PBQ). A complete case sample of 49 women completed the attentional paradigm during late pregnancy and the PBQ 3-6 months after birth. We found that women who showed greater attentional bias towards infant distress during late pregnancy reported more successful mother-infant relationships. For every 50-ms increase on our measure of attentional bias towards infant distress during late pregnancy, the odds ratio for reporting a higher PBQ score, indicative of a weaker relationship, was 0.43 (95% confidence intervals 0.23-0.81, p = 0.01). The results suggest that women's basic attentional processing of infant emotion during pregnancy influences their relationships with their infant. In the future, women's attentional processing of infant emotion could inform early strategies to promote successful mother-infant relationships in vulnerable mothers to be.
母婴关系对母亲的心理健康和婴儿的发育有重要影响。有证据表明，母亲对婴儿痛苦的敏感反应会增强这种关系。我们提出，对婴儿痛苦的注意力处理可能表明这种反应存在个体差异。研究还表明，母亲的反应是在怀孕期间发展起来的。因此，我们假设在妊娠晚期对婴儿痛苦刺激的更敏感的注意力处理将与更成功的母婴关系相关。通过社区助产士招募健康的孕妇。一个成熟的计算机化范式测量了女性从痛苦或不痛苦的婴儿面孔上转移注意力的能力。从这个范式中，我们得出了女性对婴儿痛苦的注意力偏向的指标。使用产后依恋问卷（PBQ）测量母婴关系。49 名女性在妊娠晚期完成了注意力范式，在产后 3-6 个月完成了 PBQ。我们发现，在妊娠晚期对婴儿痛苦表现出更大注意力偏向的女性报告说母婴关系更成功。在我们对妊娠晚期对婴儿痛苦的注意力偏向的测量中，每增加 50 毫秒，报告 PBQ 得分较高（表明关系较弱）的优势比为 0.43（95%置信区间为 0.23-0.81，p=0.01）。结果表明，女性在怀孕期间对婴儿情绪的基本注意力处理会影响她们与婴儿的关系。在未来，女性对婴儿情绪的注意力处理可以为有风险的母亲提供早期策略，以促进成功的母婴关系。
