Neurophysiological and behavioral dynamics of emotion in mothers with infants

描述（由申请人提供）：本申请概述了以幼儿父母为重点的职业研究项目发展的早期步骤。尽管人们普遍认为，育儿是有效组织的，父母的情绪问题会对父母和孩子的结果产生有害影响，但人们对照顾幼儿的即时情感过程知之甚少。这些信息的缺失可能会导致有关产后抑郁症干预措施有效性的研究结果不一致，这似乎有助于母亲的症状，但不一定有助于她的养育或孩子的发展。对父母情绪的更深入的了解可能有助于早期干预的设计和效果，以改善父母情绪调节，从而促进儿童的健康发展。提出的研究训练计划包括采用两种父母情绪动态测量方法的论文研究：行为方法（生态瞬间评估）和神经生理方法（脑电图）。每一种方法都允许在养育环境中研究情绪的时间过程，一种是在母亲意识的层面上，另一种是在即时神经动机过程的层面上。我将学习使用多元时间序列分析，充分利用这两种丰富的数据流（如统一结构方程建模，向量自回归建模）来解决以下论文的研究目标：(1)探讨母亲在自然环境下的情绪和应对养育挑战的时间进程与母亲抑郁症状的关系；(2)将母亲对婴儿痛苦的神经生理反应的时间过程（通过脑电图测量）与父母反应的时间相关方面的个体差异-情绪稳定性和应对质量-在行为水平上（通过EMA测量）联系起来，并确定这些因素是否共同解释了母亲抑郁症状的显著差异。此外，该培训计划还包括将父母情感概念化为一个动态过程的指导发展（即关注其时间过程和独特背景），可应用于未来的理论和实证工作，并应为有关风险养育的理论观点提供信息。它将为未来的职业研究项目奠定基础，该项目的重点是理解父母的情感，以便为有风险的父母和孩子提供干预信息。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This application outlines the early steps in the development of a career research program focusing on parents of young children. Despite widespread acceptance that parenting is affectively organized and that parent emotional problems have deleterious effects on parent and child outcomes, little is known about in-the-moment affective processes that underlie caring for a young child. The absence of this information may contribute to inconsistent findings regarding the effectiveness of postpartum depression interventions, which seem to help a mother's symptoms but not necessarily her parenting or her child's development. Greater understanding of parental emotion may aid the design and efficacy of early interventions to improve parental emotion regulation and thus promote healthy child development. The proposed research training plan includes dissertation research using two methods of dynamic measurement of parent emotion: a behavioral method (Ecological Momentary Assessment) and a neurophysiological (EEG) method. Each allows the study of the time course of emotions in the parenting context, one at the level of a mother's awareness and the other at the level of instant neural motivational processes. I will learn to use multivariate time series analysis to make full use of these two rich data streams (e.g. unified structural equation modeling, vector autoregressive modeling) to address the following dissertation research aims: (1) To relate the time course of maternal emotion and coping in parenting challenges in their natural context to maternal depressive symptoms, and (2) To relate the time course of maternal neurophysiological response to infant distress (measured via EEG) to individual differences in time- related aspects of parental response - emotion stability and coping quality - at the behavioral level (measured via EMA) and to determine if together these account for significant variance in maternal depressive symptoms. Furthermore, the training plan includes guided development of a conceptualization of parental emotion as a dynamic process (i.e. focusing on its time course and unique context) that can be applied to future theoretical and empirical work and that should inform theoretical perspectives about parenting at-risk. It will serve as a foundation for future work in a career research program focused on understanding parent emotion in order to inform intervention for at-risk parent-child dyads.