The Validity of Prenatal Assessments of Mothers’ Emotional, Cognitive, and Physiological Reactions to Infant Cry

SYNOPSIS

Objective. The current study examines the stability, convergent validity, and predictive validity of assessing pregnant women’s emotional, cognitive, and physiological responses to infant cry. Design. In an ethnically diverse sample of 259 first-time mothers and their infants, during the prenatal period physiological arousal (skin conductance) and regulation (respiratory sinus arrythmia) were recorded as mothers were exposed to four 1-min videos of crying infants. After each clip, mothers completed questionnaires and were interviewed about their cognitive (attributions, ability to detect distress, efficacy) and emotional responses (empathy, negative emotions). When infants were 6 months old, mothers’ physiological arousal and regulation were assessed while interacting with their own infants during distress-eliciting tasks, then mothers were interviewed about their emotional and cognitive responses using a video-recall method. A subset of mothers (n = 103) was re-administered the prenatal interview using the standard cry videos. Maternal sensitivity was observed during distress-eliciting tasks when infants were 6 months, 1 year, and 2 years old. Results. Mothers’ prenatal responses to cry videos were moderately stable until 6 months postpartum, converged with postnatal measures from own infant stimuli, and illustrated modest predictive validity to maternal sensitivity during the first 2 years that was comparable to predictive validity from mothers’ postpartum responses to their own infants. Conclusions. How mothers respond to cry stimuli during the prenatal period is reflective of later responses toward their own infants, and as such prenatal cry stimuli are a useful tool for parenting researchers.

ADDRESSES AND AFFILIATIONS

Esther M. Leerkes, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, PO Box 26170, Greensboro, NC 27402. E-mail: [email protected]. Savannah A. Sommers and Lauren G. Bailes are at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

ARTICLE INFORMATION

Conflict of Interest Disclosure

Each author signed a form for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. No authors reported any financial or other conflicts of interest in relation to the work described.

Ethical Principles

The authors affirm having followed professional ethical guidelines in preparing this work. These guidelines include obtaining informed consent from human participants, maintaining ethical treatment and respect for the rights of human or animal participants, and ensuring the privacy of participants and their data, such as ensuring that individual participants cannot be identified in reported results or from publicly available original or archival data.

Role of the Funders/Sponsor

None of the funders or sponsors of this research had any role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; or decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the participants for their time and Dr. Regan Burney and project staff for their dedication. The ideas and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors alone, and endorsement by the authors’ institutions or the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development is not intended and should not be inferred.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by R01HD058578 and R21HD073594 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development.