Temporal coordination between maternal looming and infant gaze in depressed and nondepressed dyads: A bootstrapping approach.

In this study, we examine the convergent validity of a measure of maternal looming derived using a motion capture system, and the temporal coordination between maternal loom and infant gaze using an event-based bootstrapping procedure. The sample comprised 26 mothers diagnosed with postpartum depression, 43 nondepressed mothers, and their 4-month-old infants. Mother-infant interactions were recorded during a standard face-to-face setting using video cameras and a motion capture system. First, results showed that maternal looming was correlated with a globally coded measure of maternal overriding. Maternal overriding is an intrusive behavior occurring when the mother re-directs the infant's attention to parent-led activities. Thus, this result confirms that maternal looming can be considered a spatial intrusion in early interactions. Second, results showed that compared to nondepressed dyads, depressed dyads were more likely to coordinate maternal loom and infant gaze in a Loom-in-Gaze-pattern. We discuss the use of automated measurement for analyzing mother-infant interactions, and how the Loom-in-Gaze pattern can be interpreted as a disturbance in infant self-regulation.

Normality, subjectivity and mental health: A genealogy of Danish psychiatry, 1938-2017.

The increasing prevalence of mental disorders together with the uncertain validity of psychopathological diagnostics challenges psychiatry as the primary home of studying, diagnosing and treating mental health problems and developing mental healthcare. This marks an emerging paradigmatical shift towards 'alternative' mental health perspectives. With the ambition of attending authoritatively in definitory practices, contemporary scholars of psychology, sociology, anthropology and philosophy call for an interdisciplinary approach to mental health, with a predominant focus on the subject. We argue that a paradigmatical shift of mental health requires structural-historical considerations of the foundations upon which subjectivity has been and still is manifested through psychiatry. On this basis, we critically investigate fluctuating psychiatric discourses on subjectivity, normality and pathology. We conducted a genealogical analysis of 13 psychiatric sources (1938-2017) focusing on 'Psychopathy' as a fluctuating diagnosis. We elucidate how subject concepts in psychiatry develop in parallel to subject concepts in society and culture, exemplified through convincing similarities between psychopathic symptoms and neoliberal ideals. Considerations like these, offer scholars valuable bases for mental health research and debate, and also valuable insights to healthcare professionals.

Does Postpartum Depression Affect Parental Embodied Mentalizing in Mothers With 4-Months old Infants?

Parental Embodied Mentalizing (PEM) regards parents' nonverbal capacity to understand the infant's bodily manifested mental states and adjust his or her own movements accordingly. Little is known about how mothers suffering from postpartum depression (PPD) mentalize the infant on an embodied level. The aims of the present study were to investigate whether mothers meeting criteria for a PPD diagnosis differ from non-clinical mothers in regard to their PEM capacities and whether the severity of depressive symptoms was associated with PEM in mothers meeting criteria for a PPD diagnosis compared to non-clinical mothers. 10-minute long lab-based face-to-face interactions were coded with the PEM coding scheme at 4-months postpartum in mother-infant dyads with mothers meeting criteria for a PPD diagnosis (n = 29) and non-clinical mothers (n = 51). Results showed that mothers with and without a PPD diagnosis differ in their capacity to mentalize on an embodied level, but only when controlling for scores on the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS). However, more depressive symptoms as measured with the EPDS was not in itself associated with lower PEM in either group. This finding may indicate the presence of a threshold effect, i.e. that maternal PEM may be affected only when a certain degree of severity and duration in depressive symptoms is beyond a certain threshold. The importance of the findings in regard to the assessment of depression as well as more clinical perspectives are discussed.

Motor activity and spatial proximity: Relationships to infant emotions and maternal postpartum depression.

The ability to express emotions is a protective factor for infant development. Despite the multimodal nature of emotion expression, research has mainly focused on facial expressions of emotions. The present study examined motor activity and spatial proximity in relation to positive and negative infant facial expressions and maternal postpartum depression during face-to-face interactions at four months. Video cameras and a motion capture system recorded mother-infant interactions. Repeated measures ANOVAs were conducted to analyze the effect of micro-coded infant positive and negative facial affect and maternal depression diagnosis on automatically extracted measures of motor activity and spatial proximity, including speed of mothers' arm movements (nondepressed = 32; PPD = 16), and infants' arm movements (nondepressed = 29; PPD = 17), and head distance (nondepressed = 45; PPD = 27). Results showed that the speed of infants' arm movements and head distance were greater during negative compared to positive infant affect. Further, the results demonstrated that the speed of PPD mothers' arm movements was slower than the speed of nondepressed mothers' arm movements. In the discussion, it is suggested that increased speed of infant arm movements during negative affect functions to elicit faster caregiving responses, and that increased head distance during negative infant affect functions to decrease the intensity of the interaction. Finally, the slower speed of arm movements in PPD mothers suggests psychomotor retardation, which is proposed to limit these mothers' abilities to engage their infants during the interaction.

Mutual regulation between infant facial affect and maternal touch in depressed and nondepressed dyads.

The ability to regulate affect is important for later adaptive child development. In the first months of life, infants have limited resources for regulating their own affects (e.g. by gaze aversion), and for this reason they are dependent on external affect regulation from their parents. Previous research suggests that touch is an important means through which parents regulate their infants' affects. Also, previous research has shown that post-partum depressed (PPD) mothers and nonclinical mothers differ in their touching behaviors when interacting with their infants. We examined the affect-regulating function of affectionate, caregiving and playful maternal touch in 24 PPD and 47 nonclinical mother-infant dyads when infants were four months old. In order to investigate the direction of effects and to account for repeated observations, the data were analysed using time-window sequential analysis and Generalized Estimating Equations. The results showed that mothers adapt their touching behaviors according to negative infant facial affect; thus, when the infant displays negative facial affect, the mothers were less likely to initiate playful touch and more likely to initiate caregiving touch. Unexpectedly, only in the PPD dyads, were the mothers more likely to initiate affectionate touch when their infants were displaying negative facial affect. Our results also showed that mothers use specific touch types to regulate infants' negative and positive affects; infants are more likely to initiate positive affect during periods with playful touch, and more likely to terminate negative affect during periods with caregiving touch.

Shaping of Reach-to-Grasp Kinematics by Intentions: A Meta-Analysis.

When we reach to grasp something, we need to take into account both the properties of the object we are grasping and the intention we have in mind. Previous research has found these constraints to be visible in the reach-to-grasp kinematics, but there is no consensus on which kinematic parameters are the most sensitive. To examine this, a systematic literature search and meta-analyses were performed. The search identified studies assessing how changes in either an object property or a prior intention affect reach-to-grasp kinematics in healthy participants. Hereafter, meta-analyses were conducted using a restricted maximum likelihood random effect model. The meta-analyses showed that changes in both object properties and prior intentions affected reach-to-grasp kinematics. Based on these results, the authors argue for a tripartition of the reach-to-grasp movement in which the accelerating part of the reach is primarily associated with transporting the hand to the object (i.e., extrinsic object properties), the decelerating part of the reach is used as a preparation for object manipulation (i.e., prepare the grasp or the subsequent action), and the grasp is associated with manipulating the object's intrinsic properties, especially object size.

Maternal touch in caregiving behavior of mothers with and without postpartum depression.

The way a mother touches her infant plays a central role in maternal caregiving behavior. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to examine associations between touch and positive and negative caregiving behavior and whether this association differed in mothers with and without postpartum depression, an episode of depressive disorder following childbirth. Positive caregiving behavior was operationalized as sensitive behavior, i.e. the mother's ability to notice the child's signals, interpret these signals correctly and respond to them promptly and appropriately. Negative caregiving behavior was operationalized as overriding behavior, i.e. behavior which disturbs the child's behavior or redirects the child's attention to follow the parent's agenda. Seventy mother-infant dyads (44 in the nonclinical group and 26 in the clinical group) participated in a 10minutes long mother-infant interaction at four months postpartum. The sample is part of an archival dataset of a longitudinal study investigating the parent-child relationship and child development. Three minutes of the interaction were coded a) microanalytically for touch, using a modified version of the Maternal Touch Scale (Beebe et al., 2010), and b) macroanalytically for sensitive and overriding behavior, using the Coding Interactive Behavior measure (Feldman, 1998). Hierarchical regression analyses with bootstrapping showed that caregiving touch, but not affectionate and static touch, was associated with sensitive behavior across the whole sample. Moreover, playful, but not rough-intrusive touch, was associated with overriding behavior across the whole sample. Associations did not differ between mothers with and without postpartum depression.

Relations between Automatically Extracted Motion Features and the Quality of Mother-Infant Interactions at 4 and 13 Months.

Bodily movements are an essential component of social interactions. However, the role of movement in early mother-infant interaction has received little attention in the research literature. The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between automatically extracted motion features and interaction quality in mother-infant interactions at 4 and 13 months. The sample consisted of 19 mother-infant dyads at 4 months and 33 mother-infant dyads at 13 months. The coding system Coding Interactive Behavior (CIB) was used for rating the quality of the interactions. Kinetic energy of upper-body, arms and head motion was calculated and used as segmentation in order to extract coarse- and fine-grained motion features. Spearman correlations were conducted between the composites derived from the CIB and the coarse- and fine-grained motion features. At both 4 and 13 months, longer durations of maternal arm motion and infant upper-body motion were associated with more aversive interactions, i.e., more parent-led interactions and more infant negativity. Further, at 4 months, the amount of motion silence was related to more adaptive interactions, i.e., more sensitive and child-led interactions. Analyses of the fine-grained motion features showed that if the mother coordinates her head movements with her infant's head movements, the interaction is rated as more adaptive in terms of less infant negativity and less dyadic negative states. We found more and stronger correlations between the motion features and the interaction qualities at 4 compared to 13 months. These results highlight that motion features are related to the quality of mother-infant interactions. Factors such as infant age and interaction set-up are likely to modify the meaning and importance of different motion features.

A longitudinal study of coordination in mother-infant vocal interaction from age 4 to 10 months.

This is a longitudinal study of development in coordinated mother-infant vocal interaction from 4 to 10 months (N = 41) focusing on the development of turn-taking patterns and time spent in coordinated vocal interaction. Data analyses were carried out using multistate analysis. Both mothers and infants were found to coordinate their own vocalizations with their partners' vocalizations. The infants had a predominant pattern of covocalizing, whereas the mothers had a predominant turn-taking pattern at all ages (4, 7, and 10 months). However, a significant reduction in the duration of covocalization was found between 4 and 7 months, due to less covocalizing compared to turn-taking from the infants. In addition, time spent in coordinated vocal interaction increased significantly between 4 and 7 months and a development for the infants was found from repeated vocalizations toward single vocalizations between maternal turns. Taken together, these findings indicate a developmental process of fine-tuning and increasing the turn-taking format for vocal communication, characterizing adult communication, before the development of speech. In addition, our results indicate that this development starts earlier and is more prolonged than has been hypothesized from previous research. (PsycINFO Database Record

The change and development of statistical methods used in research articles in child development 1930-2010.

The evolution of developmental psychology has been characterized by the use of different quantitative and qualitative methods and procedures. But how does the use of methods and procedures change over time? This study explores the change and development of statistical methods used in articles published in Child Development from 1930 to 2010. The methods used in every article in the first issue of every volume were categorized into four categories. Until 1980 relatively simple statistical methods were used. During the last 30 years there has been an explosive use of more advanced statistical methods employed. The absence of statistical methods or use of simple methods had been eliminated.

The relationship between body movements and qualities of social interaction between a boy with severe developmental disabilities and his caregiver.

Research in social interaction and nonverbal communication among individuals with severe developmental disabilities also includes the study of body movements. Advances in analytical technology give new possibilities for measuring body movements more accurately and reliably. One such advance is the Qualisys Motion Capture System (QMCS), which utilizes optical markers to capture body movements. The aim of this study was to explore the practicality of measuring body movements in the nonverbal communication of a child with severe developmental disabilities. A preliminary case study has been undertaken. The social interaction between a boy with developmental disabilities and his teacher was analyzed (1) using observer ratings on psychological aspects of the social interaction and (2) measuring body positions, velocity, and angles of body movements using the QMCS. Associations between observer ratings and measured body movements were examined. This preliminary case study has indicated that emotional response and attention level during the social interaction corresponded with local, synchronized movements and face-to-face orientation. Measurement of motor behavior is suggested as being a potentially useful methodological approach to studying social interaction and communication development.

Measuring spatial proximity in mother-infant interaction: a kinematic approach for an examination of the effects of maternal postpartum depression.

A kinematic approach was used to measure mother-infant spatial proximity at 4 months. Maternal postpartum depression (PPD) impacts on mother-infant spatial interaction. We compared 28 dyads with mothers meeting criteria for PPD and 46 typical dyads. The PPD dyads had less variability in spatial proximity compared to typical dyads.

A moderate eclecticism: ontological and epistemological issues.

The principle of eclecticism is discussed with the point of departure in a definition of psychology and its subject areas. It is argued that eclecticism constitutes one of the key developmental conditions for science. The argument begins with an analysis of the distinction between real and recognized object and concludes that a scientific object always has an infinite number of aspects and that this fact is not reducible to a question of complexity. Next a differentiation between theoretical levels based on ontological arguments are introduced and it is concluded that it is necessary to accept positive eclectic processes in theories, and that development of theories is due to an eclectic relationship with other theories. A series of examples are given for different versions of the eclectic development of psychological disciplines and concepts, namely phenomenology, psychoanalysis, stress, and cognition.

Neurosis: aspects of its conceptual development in the nineteenth century.

The concept of 'neurosis' does not have a very high priority in the history of psychiatry. The very few studies of the historical development of the concept are discussed, especially that of Pienero. The relations between psychiatry and neurology in the nineteenth century are described to provide a background for the constitution of the concept; its relationships to 'psychic shock' and 'psychic paralysis' are also analysed.