Bio:
Lauren is a postdoctoral fellow in psychology working with Brenda Volling at the Center for Human Growth and Development. She received her PhD in Child and Family Studies at the University of Tennessee in May. Her dissertation looked at infant social-emotional develop and mothering among the Gamo of Southern Ethiopia. She is currently investigating the role of attachment in mother and infant cortisol reactivity and attunement during stress. She will be presenting on her two lines of research.

Abstract:
Parents’ beliefs about their infants and their ensuing parenting strategies are shaped by ecological contexts and cultural schema. Furthermore, parents respond to their infants’ emotions in ways they believe are most appropriate. According to attachment theory, these reciprocal interactions make up the infants’ social-emotional environment and appear to guide future development and relationship formation; however, this trajectory is supported mostly from research in Western industrialized contexts. In this study, parents’ perceptions of infants’ emotions were investigated through a qualitative study that included interviews with 29 Gamo (Southern Ethiopia) mothers about perceptions of their infants’ emotions and what they believed were the best responses. Next, we examined the link between Gamo mothers’ feelings about their infants’ negative emotions and mother-infant interactions measured through focal-infant observations. In interviews with Gamo mothers, perceptions of infant emotions were associated with beliefs about basic needs for infants and some mothers expressed stress when their infants fussed or cried. Mothers who reported stress showed fewer mother-infant interactions. However, mothers who did not express stress had infants that fussed and cried more than infants of mothers who reported stress. The link between Gamo mothers’ perceptions of their infants’ emotions and basic needs suggests that mothers were mainly focused on keeping infants healthy and alive in a relatively harsh environment. Lastly, infants with nonstressed mothers may cry and fuss more because they are involved in more interactions with their mothers overall and perhaps use fussing and crying to maintain interactions.

The mother-infant attachment relationship covaries with cortisol reactivity during stress. Insecure infants display elevated cortisol levels during the strange situation procedure (SSP) and either fail to return to baseline or demonstrate increases in cortisol levels following the SSP. Yet, mothers’ cortisol levels during and after the SSP have not been sufficiently examined. The goal of this study was to investigate mothers’ and infants’ cortisol reactivity during the SSP and security of the mother-infant attachment. We found a significant interaction between infants’ cortisol and attachment indicating that cortisol levels differed across the four samples over time for avoidant, secure, ambivalent, and disorganized infants. Secure and insecure infants had different trajectories of cortisol reactivity and regulation. In line with previous research, insecure, specifically disorganized infants compared to securely attached infants displayed different patterns of cortisol reactivity, suggesting these infants’ HPA axis is organized in a way that reflects the context of the insecure mother-infant relationship.