Tracking Emotional Engagement during Parent-Infant Activities
In their groundbreaking work, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, Mahler, Pine and Bergman describe the complex bodily interaction patterns that develop and are elaborated on over time between parent and baby. They suggest, and subsequent infant researchers have confirmed and detailed, that what is physical between parent and baby becomes part of the infant’s psychology. The caregiver is the co-regulator of infant states. Vocal, facial, and bodily interaction patterns between parent and infant literally organize the infant’s brain, affecting its function, structure, and neurochemical architecture and forming the sensorimotor foundations of the infant’s later sense of self and of self and object representations.
Infant observation narratives, based on Esther Bick's format and written by experienced clinicians in the ABPIP, describe in detail weekly interactions between parents and babies over the course of the infants’ first year of life. Numerous case studies of infant observations have discussed the intense feelings raised in observers by witnessing parents and babies, and there is a powerful resonance between observers’ emotional responses and what they observe to occur between parent and baby. The narratives have great potential as data to be studied. This study looks at the earliest months of development and the parent-infant relationship longitudinally and in a natural setting.
Infant observation narratives, based on Esther Bick's format and written by experienced clinicians in the ABPIP, describe in detail weekly interactions between parents and babies over the course of the infants’ first year of life. Numerous case studies of infant observations have discussed the intense feelings raised in observers by witnessing parents and babies, and there is a powerful resonance between observers’ emotional responses and what they observe to occur between parent and baby. The narratives have great potential as data to be studied. This study looks at the earliest months of development and the parent-infant relationship longitudinally and in a natural setting.
With grants in 2014 and 2015 from the Margaret S. Mahler Child Development Foundation and the Norbert Freedman Center for Psychoanalytic Research at IPTAR, the co-directors of the ABPIP have been conducting research on infant observation narratives. These narratives were written by ABPIP students detailing their weekly home visits to mothers and babies during the babies' first year of life. This study looks at the ways in which parental dynamics and conflicts may be transmitted pre-verbally to the baby, picked up through the baby's sensorimotor schemata, and eventually symbolized in the older child's play, fantasy, or language.
Currently, the study is closely analyzing two mother-infant dyad narratives whose observations were also videotaped. One dyad has been followed longitudinally for five years. |
Previously, the co-directors, along with research assistants Erika Lubliner and Andrea Paloian, established a method for dividing the written infant observation narratives thematically into segments comprised of different kinds of bodily caregiving activities engaged in by parent and baby called Parent-Infant Activity Episodes (PIAE). In collaboration with Drs. Wilma Bucci and Bernard Maskit and statistician Sean Murphy, the narratives have been analyzed using Referential Activity (RA) measures. RA is the major measure of the Referential Process, a psychological construct originated by Bucci concerning the processes by which a speaker or writer accesses emotional experience and communicates this in language that evokes a corresponding experience in a listener or reader. Maskit has developed and validated computerized measures of RA. Using these measures, this project is analyzing observation narratives to gain information about the observers' degree of emotional engagement in the parent-baby interactions they observed and wrote about.
In a pilot study, one set of twenty-four infant observation narratives written over the course of the infant's first eight months of life were segmented into Parent-Infant Activity Episodes and also into three longitudinal Phases. Computerized measures of the Referential Process were applied to the Parent-Infant Activity Episode segments and to the Phase segments. Differences were found in RA measures dependent on Activity Episodes and on Phases.
Most recently, the study has looked at the extent to which differences in Referential Process measures across different Parent-Infant Activity Episodes reflect aspects of emotional engagement between parent and baby, and/or are affected by the particular observer. Three ABPIP graduates viewed videotapes of two different mother-infant dyads taken over the span of the infants' first eight months and wrote infant observation narratives based on the videos. Two trained coders segmented the narratives into Parent-Infant Activity Episodes. The statistical analysis of the data is in the process of being completed.
The study has completed play sessions and Story Stems on one of the videotaped babies who is now five years old, and also completed an Adult Attachment Interview and Parent Function Interview with the mother, and a parent-child play session with both. The Feldman Coding Interactive Behavior, an independent measure of mother-infant interaction, will be used to analyze particular Parent-Infant Activity Episodes in the early infant observation videotapes.
In a pilot study, one set of twenty-four infant observation narratives written over the course of the infant's first eight months of life were segmented into Parent-Infant Activity Episodes and also into three longitudinal Phases. Computerized measures of the Referential Process were applied to the Parent-Infant Activity Episode segments and to the Phase segments. Differences were found in RA measures dependent on Activity Episodes and on Phases.
Most recently, the study has looked at the extent to which differences in Referential Process measures across different Parent-Infant Activity Episodes reflect aspects of emotional engagement between parent and baby, and/or are affected by the particular observer. Three ABPIP graduates viewed videotapes of two different mother-infant dyads taken over the span of the infants' first eight months and wrote infant observation narratives based on the videos. Two trained coders segmented the narratives into Parent-Infant Activity Episodes. The statistical analysis of the data is in the process of being completed.
The study has completed play sessions and Story Stems on one of the videotaped babies who is now five years old, and also completed an Adult Attachment Interview and Parent Function Interview with the mother, and a parent-child play session with both. The Feldman Coding Interactive Behavior, an independent measure of mother-infant interaction, will be used to analyze particular Parent-Infant Activity Episodes in the early infant observation videotapes.