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Browsing University Archives by Author "Ablow, Jennifer"

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    Assessments (in the Making) of Attachment in the Making: Organized Patterns of Infant Regulatory Behavior in Response to the Maternal Still-Face
    (University of Oregon, 2024-12-19) Hagan, Katherine; Ablow, Jennifer
    Infants’ experiences of caregiver attunement and regulatory support in the first months of life likely shape embodied expectations about the self, the caregiver, and the extent to which the emerging attachment relationship can transform and soothe distress. Infants’ biobehavioral responses to the Still-Face Paradigm (SF) offer a potential index of these emerging expectations, with potential implications for understanding precursors to later quality of attachment and the origins and malleability of these precursors in early development. This dissertation adopts a programmatic and integrative approach to evaluating the possibility that infant responses to the Still-Face paradigm are meaningfully indicative of dyadic adjustment during the infant’s first year of life and potentially prognostic of quality of attachment in the infant’s second year. To this end, the introduction to the dissertation describes (1) the theoretical and empirical rationale for regarding infant SF response as a marker of the infant’s interactive history and (2) the importance that identification of attachment-like regulatory patterns or precursors to later quality of attachment in the SF may have for the study of infant adaptation and long-term health. The dissertation’s second chapter consists of a narrative review of existing efforts to glean attachment-like patterns or otherwise predict later quality of attachment on the basis of infants’ SF response. The narrative review details discrete affective and regulatory behaviors in the SF that have received attention as possible markers of infants’ attachment-related working models in-the-making; the review identifies overlap and discrepancies among existing microanalytic findings. While modest associations between infant SF behaviors and attachment outcomes point to the promise of the SF paradigm as a source of information about dyadic adjustment and attachment in the making, discrepancies across microanalytic studies of discrete behaviors (including among infants at different ages) and differences in measurement strategies exemplify the need for programmatic, synthesizing efforts to facilitate comparison of findings between studies. The narrative review also draws on the development of the attachment classificatory system to advocate for an approach to individual differences in the SF that attends to organized patterns of regulatory behavior rather than discrete behaviors. The subsequent chapters of this dissertation examine proximal and distal correlates to infant regulatory responses in the SF, by way of three sub-studies of a single sample of mother-infant dyads contending with socioeconomic and other psychosocial risk. Each of the three sub-studies make use of archived recordings of the SF paradigm and leverage secondary analysis of several related measures that were collected in an already-completed study that predated the dissertation. Study 1 adopts a novel but existing typological approach to identifying organized patterns of infant regulatory behavior in the SF, to in turn compare the distribution of the patterns in the present sample to that of other samples that have applied a similarly categorical approach. Study 1 also (a) examines evidence for convergent validity of the regulatory patterns by juxtaposing the patterns with more granular approaches to observing and describing infant SF behavior, and (b) evaluates the hypothesis that patterning of infant regulatory behavior reflects features of the infant’s interactive history. Study 2 examines whether patterns of regulatory behavior are accompanied by differences in infants’ autonomic (specifically, heart rate and respiratory sinus arrhythmia) responses to the SF stressor. Finally, Study 3 seeks to replicate an existing finding of association between SF regulatory patterns and later organized attachment classification. Studies 1 and 2 find evidence of convergent validity of the regulatory patterns, which exhibit expected associations with more granular observations of infant behavior, maternal sensitivity to infant distress, and differential changes in infant heart rate during the SF paradigm. While several hypothesized associations between infants’ SF-based regulatory patterns and concurrent measures bear out in the present study, the regulatory patterns observed in the SF paradigm in this sample at five months postpartum are not associated with later organized quality of attachment assessed in the Strange Situation Procedure one year later. Connections to current findings are discussed, as are recommendations for future study of organized patterns of regulatory behavior and attachment in the making.
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    Mindfully Parenting the Next Generation: Maternal History of Child Maltreatment, Stress, and Infant Attachment
    (University of Oregon, 2020-02-27) Hertz, Robin; Ablow, Jennifer
    Child maltreatment is associated with an enormous public health cost, and can be perpetuated intergenerationally via developmental effects of maltreatment (e.g., difficulties in stress regulation) that influence quality of caregiving. Mindfulness and mindful parenting have been associated with secure attachment, and may have therapeutic potential to enhance stress regulation and attachment security in parent-child dyads. The current study examined potential moderating effects of dispositional mindfulness and mindful parenting on the associations between maternal history of child maltreatment and mother/infant acute stress recovery as well as infant attachment classification. Mothers and infants participated in a stressful procedure designed to activate attachment behavior. Mothers and infants also provided cortisol samples after the procedure to provide information about physiological stress recovery. A significant interaction was found such that the infants of mothers with more severe histories of child maltreatment showed enhanced cortisol recovery when maternal dispositional mindfulness was high. Maternal mindfulness, however, was not otherwise associated with mother or infant cortisol recovery, nor did maternal history of child maltreatment or mindfulness significantly predict infant attachment classification. In contrast to expectations, maternal history of child maltreatment was associated with enhanced maternal cortisol recovery. This study provides preliminary evidence that higher levels of maternal dispositional mindfulness may indirectly help infants of mothers with more severe histories of child maltreatment to recover more efficiently from attachment-related stress.