How do parents' depression and anxiety, and infants' negative temperament relate to parent–infant face-to-face interactions?

The present study investigated the associations of mothers' and fathers' lifetime depression and anxiety symptoms, and of infants' negative temperament with parents' and infants' gaze, facial expressions of emotion, and synchrony. We observed infants' (age between 3.5 and 5.5 months, N = 101) and parents' gaze and facial expressions during 4-min naturalistic face-to-face interactions. Parents' lifetime symptoms of depression and anxiety were assessed with clinical interviews, and infants' negative temperament was measured with standardized observations. Parents with more depressive symptoms and their infants expressed less positive and more neutral affect. Parents' lifetime anxiety symptoms were not significantly related to parents' expressions of affect, while they were linked to longer durations of gaze to parent, and to more positive and negative affect in infants. Parents' lifetime depression or anxiety was not related to synchrony. Infants' temperament did not predict infants' or parents' interactive behavior. The study reveals that more depression symptoms in parents are linked to more neutral affect from parents and from infants during face-to-face interactions, while parents' anxiety symptoms are related to more attention to parent and less neutral affect from infants (but not from parents)

Bidirectional Associations Between Coparenting Relations and Family Member Anxiety: A Review and Conceptual Model

Research into anxiety has largely ignored the dynamics of family systems in anxiety development. Coparenting refers to the quality of coordination between individuals responsible for the upbringing of children and links different subsystems within the family, such as the child, the marital relationship, and the parents. This review discusses the potential mechanisms and empirical findings regarding the bidirectional relations of parent and child anxiety with coparenting. The majority of studies point to bidirectional associations between greater coparenting difficulties and higher levels of anxiety. For example, the few available studies suggest that paternal and perhaps maternal anxiety is linked to lower coparental support. Also, research supports the existence of inverse links between coparenting quality and child anxiety. A child’s reactive temperament appears to have adverse effects on particularly coparenting of fathers. A conceptual model is proposed that integrates the role of parental and child anxiety, parenting, and coparenting, to guide future research and the development of clinical interventions. Future research should distinguish between fathers’ and mothers’ coparenting behaviors, include parental anxiety, and investigate the coparental relationship longitudinally. Clinicians should be aware of the reciprocal relations between child anxiety and coparenting quality, and families presenting for treatment who report child (or parent) anxiety should be assessed for difficulties in coparenting. Clinical approaches to bolster coparenting quality are called for.FSW – Publicaties zonder aanstelling Universiteit Leide

Parental Expressions of Anxiety and Child Temperament in Toddlerhood Jointly Predict Preschoolers’ Avoidance of Novelty

This study investigated the link between (a) parents’ social trait and state anxiety and (b) children’s fear and avoidance in social referencing situations in a longitudinal design and considered the modulating role of child temperament in these links. Children were confronted with a stranger and a robot, separately with their father and mother at 1 (N = 122), at 2.5 (N = 117), and at 4.5 (N = 111) years of age. Behavioral inhibition (BI) was separately observed at 1 and 2.5 years. Parents’ social anxiety disorder (SAD) severity was assessed via interviews prenatally and at 4.5 years. More expressed anxiety by parents at 4.5 years was not significantly linked to more fear or avoidance at 4.5 years. High BI children were more avoidant at 4.5 years if their parents expressed more anxiety at 2.5 years, and they were more fearful if the parents had more severe forms of lifetime SAD. More severe lifetime forms of SAD were also related to more pronounced increases in child fear and avoidance over time, whereas parents’ expressions of anxiety predicted more pronounced increases in avoidance only from 2.5 to 4.5 years. High BI toddlers of parents with higher state and trait anxiety become more avoidant of novelty as preschoolers, illustrating the importance of considering child temperamental dispositions in the links between child and parent anxiety. Moreover, children of parents with more trait and state anxiety showed more pronounced increases in fear and avoidance over time, highlighting the importance of early interventions targeting parents’ SAD. FSW - Self-regulation models for health behavior and psychopathology - ou

The interplay between expressed parental anxiety and infant behavioural inhibition predicts infant avoidance in a social referencing paradigm

Background: Anxiety aggregates in families. Environmental factors, such as modelling of anxious behaviours, are assumed to play a causal role in the development of child anxiety. We investigated the predictive value of paternal and maternal anxiety (lifetime anxiety disorders and expressed parental anxiety) on infants’ fear and avoidance during encounters with social and nonsocial novel stimuli in a social referencing (SR) paradigm.Methods: A total of 122 12-month-old infants participated in this study separately with their fathers and mothers (parents with lifetime: social anxiety disorders [n = 47], other types of anxiety disorders [n = 33], comorbid social and other types of anxiety disorders [n = 52] and without anxiety disorders [n = 112]). Infants were confronted with a stranger and a mechanical dinosaur as novel stimuli in two SR situations. Infants’ avoidance as well as fear and parents’ expressed anxiety were observed. Infants’ behavioural inhibition (BI) was separately observed in structured tasks. Results: Parental lifetime anxiety disorders did not significantly predict infant fear or avoidance. Expressed parental anxiety interacted with BI to significantly predict infant avoidance, revealing a positive association between expressed parental anxiety and infant avoidance among infants with moderate-to-high BI. The association between infant avoidance and expressed parental anxiety was not significantly different for mothers and fathers, pointing to an equally important role of fathers at this young age. Infant fear was significantly predicted by infant BI, but not by expressed parental anxiety. Conclusions: Infants with a temperamental disposition for anxiety (BI) may learn from both paternal and maternal anxious signals and become avoidant towards novelty when their parents express anxiety. This link between expressed parental anxiety and infant avoidance for moderate-to-high BI children, that seems to hold across contexts and to be independent of lifetime parental anxiety disorders, may be a mechanism explaining early intergenerational transmission of anxiety. FSW – Publicaties zonder aanstelling Universiteit Leide

Mindful Parenting in Secondary Child Mental Health: Key Parenting Predictors of Treatment Effects

Stress and Psychopatholog

Pre-verbal infants perceive emotional facial expressions categorically

Adults perceive emotional expressions categorically, with discrimination being faster and more accurate between expressions from different emotion categories (i.e. blends with two different predominant emotions) than between two stimuli from the same category (i.e. blends with the same predominant emotion). The current study sought to test whether facial expressions of happiness and fear are perceived categorically by pre-verbal infants, using a new stimulus set that was shown to yield categorical perception in adult observers (Experiments 1 and 2). These stimuli were then used with 7-month-old infants (N  =  34) using a habituation and visual preference paradigm (Experiment 3). Infants were first habituated to an expression of one emotion, then presented with the same expression paired with a novel expression either from the same emotion category or from a different emotion category. After habituation to fear, infants displayed a novelty preference for pairs of between-category expressions, but not within-category ones, showing categorical perception. However, infants showed no novelty preference when they were habituated to happiness. Our findings provide evidence for categorical perception of emotional expressions in pre-verbal infants, while the asymmetrical effect challenges the notion of a bias towards negative information in this age group

Pruning a Minimum Spanning Tree

This work employs some techniques in order to filter random noise from the information provided by minimum spanning trees obtained from the correlation matrices of international stock market indices prior to and during times of crisis. The first technique establishes a threshold above which connections are considered affected by noise, based on the study of random networks with the same probability density distribution of the original data. The second technique is to judge the strengh of a connection by its survival rate, which is the amount of time a connection between two stock market indices endure. The idea is that true connections will survive for longer periods of time, and that random connections will not. That information is then combined with the information obtained from the first technique in order to create a smaller network, where most of the connections are either strong or enduring in time