The current study examined associations between maternal posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and infant emotional reactivity and emotion regulation during the first year of life in a primarily low-income, urban, ethnic/racial minority sample of 52 mother–infant dyads. Mothers completed questionnaires assessing their own trauma exposure history and current PTSD and depressive symptoms and their infants’ temperament when the infants were 6 months old. Dyads participated in the repeated Still-Face Paradigm (SFP-R) when the infants were 6 months old, and infant affective states were coded for each SFP-R episode. Mothers completed questionnaires assessing infant trauma exposure history and infant current emotional and behavioral symptoms when the infants were 13 months old. Maternal PTSD symptoms predicted infants’ emotion regulation at 6 months as assessed by (a) infant ability to recover from distress during the SFP-R and (b) maternal report of infant rate of recovery from distress/arousal in daily life. Maternal PTSD symptoms also predicted maternal report of infant externalizing, internalizing, and dysregulation symptoms at 13 months. Maternal PTSD was not associated with measures of infant emotional reactivity. Neither maternal depressive symptoms nor infant direct exposure to trauma accounted for the associations between maternal PTSD symptoms and infant outcomes. These findings suggest that maternal PTSD is associated with offspring emotion regulation difficulties as early as infancy. Such difficulties may contribute to increased risk of mental health problems among children of mothers with PTSD.
There has been increasing emphasis in the extant literature on the importance of self-regulation—the ability to manage one's emotions, attention, physiology, and behavior in a way that promotes competent functioning—in normal development as well as the developmental psychopathology of various mental disorders (Barton and Robins, 2000, Bell and McBride, 2010, Eisenberg et al., 2010, Gardner et al., 2008 and National Research Council, 2009). In their landmark report From Neurons to Neighborhoods, the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine (2000) concluded that one of the core concepts of development that has emerged from years of research is that “the growth of self-regulation is a cornerstone of early childhood development that cuts across all domains of behavior” (p. 3). Given the importance of self-regulation for multiple aspects of functioning, determining factors that interfere with its attainment is a critical area of research. Evidence suggests that exposure to maternal psychopathology during early development may have a substantial impact on child self-regulation ( Brand and Brennan, 2009, Brummelte and Galea, 2010, Davis et al., 2004, Field, 2010 and Goodman and Gotlib, 1999). Much of this research has been based on studies of depressed, and to a lesser extent, anxious mothers. The impact of maternal posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on child regulation has received comparatively little attention, though data from multiple sources suggest that exposure to maternal PTSD may have a profound effect on children's self-regulatory abilities ( Bosquet Enlow et al., 2009, Brand et al., 2006, Chemtob et al., 2010 and Kaitz et al., 2009).
