University of Virginia, Department of Neurology, USA.
University of Virginia, Department of Systems and Information Engineering, USA.
Infant Behav Dev. 2024 Sep;76:101980. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2024.101980. Epub 2024 Aug 24.
Classic attachment theory emphasizes the sensitivity of the parent to perceive and appropriately respond to the infant's cues. However, parent-child attachment is a dyadic interaction that is also dependent upon the sensitivity of the child to the early caregiving environment. Individual differences in infant sensitivity to parental cues is likely shaped by both the early caregiving environment as well as the infant's neurobiology, such as perceptual sensitivity to social stimuli. Here, we investigated associations between maternal postpartum depression and infant neurological sensitivity to affective touch using brain signal entropy - a metric of the brain's moment-to-moment variability related to signal processing. We recruited two independent samples of infants aged 0-5 months. In Sample 1 (n = 79), we found increased levels of maternal postpartum depression were associated with diminished perceptual sensitivity - i.e. lower entropy - to affective tactile stimulation specifically within the primary somatosensory cortex. In Sample 2 (n = 36), we replicated this finding and showed that this effect was not related to characteristics of the touch administered during the experiment. These results suggest that decreased affective touch early in life - a common consequence of postpartum depression - likely impacts the infant's perceptual sensitivity to affective touch and ultimately the formation of experience-dependent neural networks that support the successful formation of attachment relationships.
经典的依恋理论强调父母对婴儿暗示的敏感性和适当反应能力。然而，亲子依恋是一种双向互动，也依赖于儿童对早期养育环境的敏感性。婴儿对父母暗示的敏感性的个体差异可能受到早期养育环境以及婴儿神经生物学的影响，例如对社会刺激的感知敏感性。在这里，我们使用大脑信号熵（一种与信号处理相关的大脑即时变化的度量）来研究产后抑郁的母亲与婴儿对情感触觉的神经敏感性之间的关联。我们招募了两个年龄在 0-5 个月的婴儿独立样本。在样本 1（n=79）中，我们发现产后抑郁程度较高与对情感触觉刺激的感知敏感性降低有关，即在初级体感皮层中表现为较低的熵。在样本 2（n=36）中，我们复制了这一发现，并表明这种效应与实验中进行的触觉特征无关。这些结果表明，生命早期的情感触觉减少——这是产后抑郁的常见后果——可能会影响婴儿对情感触觉的感知敏感性，并最终影响支持成功形成依恋关系的经验依赖性神经网络的形成。
