Neurophysiological and behavioral dynamics of emotion in mothers with infants

描述(由申请者提供)：这份申请概述了职业研究计划发展的早期步骤，重点是年幼孩子的父母。尽管人们普遍认为，育儿是以情感方式组织起来的，父母的情绪问题会对父母和孩子的结果产生有害影响，但人们对照顾年幼孩子的瞬间情感过程知之甚少。缺乏这些信息可能会导致关于产后抑郁干预有效性的不一致结论，这些干预似乎有助于改善母亲的症状，但不一定有助于她的养育或孩子的发育。更好地理解父母的情绪可能有助于设计和实施早期干预措施，以改善父母的情绪调节，从而促进儿童的健康发展。建议的研究培训计划包括使用两种动态测量父母情绪的方法进行的论文研究：行为方法(生态瞬时评估)和神经生理(EEG)方法。每一种方法都允许在育儿环境中研究情绪的时间进程，一种是在母亲意识的水平上，另一种是在即时神经激励过程的水平上。我将学习使用多变量时间序列分析来充分利用这两个丰富的数据流(例如统一结构方程模型和向量自回归模型)来解决以下论文研究目标：(1)在自然环境中母亲情绪和应对与母亲抑郁症状之间的关系；(2)将母亲对婴儿窘迫的神经生理反应的时间过程(通过脑电测量)与父母在行为水平(通过EMA测量)的时间相关方面的反应(情绪稳定性和应对质量)的个体差异联系起来，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，培训计划包括将父母情绪概念化作为一个动态过程的指导发展(即，侧重于其时间进程和独特的背景)，可应用于未来的理论和经验工作，并应为有关风险育儿的理论观点提供信息。它将作为一个职业研究项目未来工作的基础，该项目专注于理解父母的情绪，以便为高危亲子二人组的干预提供信息。

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.