THE distressed children they are calmed and reassured by the mother who, with simple sweet words and loving hugs, has the unique power to restore lost serenity to her son. Despite being a recognized reality, the process is well understood in the research fields of pediatrics and behavioral neuroscience.
On the other hand, when the mother suffers from postpartum depression, interrupts this alchemy with her child, despite the sincere efforts made to reassure him: ” “Myriads of studies have shown that mothers with postpartum depression struggle to calm their distressed babies“, he has declared John Krzeczkowskiresearcher at the Department of Psychology and with the LaMarsh Center for Child and Youth Research: “However, it is not known how mothers’ calming signals are passed on to their baby, how postpartum depression disrupts this process or whether treatment of depressed mothers can alter these signals. “
“To investigate this, my team and I looked at the links between the physiology of the mother and babies when dealing with distressed babies.“. Continued Krzeczkowski, who has developed a study in this regard together with his team of collaborators.
The results of the Research have been published in the scientific journal Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science.
Distressed children: this is what the mothers’ “relaxing dance” is
Krzeczkowski’s team, which included professors of behavioral neuroscience Louis A. Schmidt (McMaster) and Mark A. Ferro (University of Waterloo), as well as Dr. Ryan J. Van Lieshout, physician and neuroscience researcher at McMaster, worked with two sets of the mother-infant pairs: in the control group, both mothers and babies were healthy; in the other group, the mothers had received a diagnosis of PPD (postpartum depression) within one year of giving birth.
The study method subjected mothers and babies to three stages of interaction. In the play phase, mothers played with their babies as they normally would (eg, singing, talking, touching). In the still face stage, mothers were asked not to touch or talk to their babies and to maintain eye contact and to adopt a blank “poker” face so that the baby became distressed and agitated. The final phase of reunion was the focus of the study: here, mothers were allowed to re-engage with their distressed babies as they did in the play phase.
During these stages, the researchers monitored both mother and baby for a measure of heart rate variability called respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), which is a known indicator of one’s emotional state.. In the meeting phase, the researchers were looking at these readings for evidence of a “feedback loop” of reciprocal heart rate signals passing between mother and baby.
The groups were tested this way twice: once to establish a baseline and then a second time, several weeks later, after mothers with PPD received, and were reported to benefit from, a course of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), improving their affective state.
In the healthy control group, Krzeczkowski’s team found that the mothers’ heart rate changes, as measured by RSA readings, preceded those of the infants, suggesting they were conducting what Krzeczkowski calls the “relaxing dance“. In contrast, in the PPD group, it was the children whose physiological signals drove the dance. But after CBT treatment, the physiological signaling of PPD mothers improved in a way that drove back and forth, just as healthy mothers had.
Krzeczkowski said these findings represent a breakthrough in what has long been a blind spot in behavioral neuroscience: “This study empirically demonstrates, for the first time, that synchronized physiology between mothers and babies plays a role in calming distressed babies and that treating PPD with CBT can improve synchronicity patterns and thus increase mothers’ ability to cope. soothe their distressed children ”.
“So now we know a little more than we ever did before about how calming signals are transmitted in real time on a moment-to-moment scale between mothers and babies. “. The paper calls for future studies to investigate whether the improvement in the calming effects of the RSA feedback loop can be casually linked to CBT treatment of mothers suffering from PPD.
“Due to the observational design of our study“, Concluded Krzeczkowski,”We cannot categorically remain on the fact that the positive changes were specifically due to the CBT treatment. The two are related but there may be confounding factors, such as the specific methods used by the mother to calm their babies, such as singing, speaking and touching. But we want more people to get treatment for PPD. We hope that by showing causality and effectiveness, it will raise the idea that these programs can benefit them ”.
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