Instruments to measure interaction of mothers and newborns: A systematic review
Interactions between newborns and their parents/primary caregivers are characterized by asymmetric and dependent relationships. This systematic review mapped, identified, and described the psychometric parameters, categories, and items of instruments used to assess mother-newborn interaction. Seven electronic databases were accessed in this study. Furthermore, this research included neonatal interaction studies describing instruments' items, domains, and psychometric properties while excluding studies that focused on maternal interactions and lacked items for assessing newborns. Additionally, studies validated with older infants that did not have a newborn in the sample were used for test v…
Mother-infant interaction and children's socio-emotional development with high- and low-risk mothers.
Charting the dynamic character of mother-infant interaction requires using observational systems of sequential coding in real time. A longitudinal study was designed to approach maternal sensitivity in a more complex way using sequential analysis. The study was conducted with 20 high- and 20 low-risk mothers and their infants (aged: 3, 12 and 15 months) to examine the relation among mothers' risk status for physical abuse and their maternal interactive profiles, using micro-social sequential analyses, and the subsequent quality of attachment developed by their children at 15 months of age. Results showed significantly different timings in maternal responses in high- and low-risk groups, tha…
Parental and Infant Gender Factors in Parent-Infant Interaction: State-Space Dynamic Analysis.
This study aimed to investigate the influence of parental gender on their interaction with their infants, considering, as well, the role of the infant’s gender. The State Space Grid (SSG) method, a graphical tool based on the non-linear dynamic system (NDS) approach was used to analyze the interaction, in Free-Play setting, of 52 infants, aged 6 to 10 months, divided into two groups: half of the infants interacted with their fathers and half with their mothers. There were 50% boys in each group. MANOVA results showed no differential parenting of boys and girls. Additionally, mothers and fathers showed no differences in the Diversity of behavioral dyadic states nor in Predictability. However…
The temporal dimension in the understanding of maternal sensitivity in caregiver-infant interactions: The 'Early Mother-Child Interaction Coding System'.
Abstract Caregiver-child interaction is known to play a central role in children’s socioemotional development, yet the diversity of measures commonly used to evaluate it call into question the nature of the construct being assessed. Contingency within caregiver-child interactions has been identified as a key dyadic process that requires taking a temporal perspective to evaluating interactions. The Early Mother-Child Interaction Coding System is a psychometrically sound measure that sequentially code the flow of interactive and non-interactive behaviours within a caregiver-infant system. Its use of the framework of nonlinear dynamical systems (NDS) expands our understanding of contingent car…
Efecto de la dosis de intervención del Programa de Apoyo Psicológico P/Materno Infantil© sobre las madres y sus bebés
This paper presents an analysis of the intervention dose-effect of the Parent Child Psychological Support Program© (Cerezo 1990) a program aimed at promoting protective adaptive system in children which is offered to all new-borns in a given catchment area. The program offers support to parents during the first 18 months of the baby's life. The program dose-effect is examined regarding the parents by examining the level of distress reported by them and with babies by examining the development of attachment using the Strange Situation test of Ainsworth et al. (1978). The study is based on 342 families who made between 2 and 4 visits to the Program before being evaluation post-intervention. T…
La Cualidad del apego infantil y sensibilidad materna desde la perspectiva microsofial [The quality of attachment in childhood and maternal sensivity: from observation of behaviours to exploration of mental representations]
Research in the area of early mother-child interaction and the development of attachment, points to the importance of advancing the study of the maternal sensitivity construct. In this pa per we describe the process followed to opera cionalise and analyze “maternal sensitivity” us ing microsocial approach. This approach can reveal empirical sequential patterns in the in teractional dyadic context that cannot be cap tured with rating scales. To describe the re search process used, this paper presents: the CITMI-R ( Codigos de Interaccion Temprana Materno-Infantil , Early Mother ‐Child Interac tion Codes) coding system and its developments, some relevant findings using sequential analyses in …