Today I will be talking about my honors thesis
called The Relation Between Bio-Behavioral
Synchrony and Chronic Maternal Stress.
Infants rely on their caregivers to meet their
basic physical and developmental needs.
Most research studies focus on mother’s
behaviors in mother infant interactions, but
few consider dyadic behaviors and physiology
known as bio-behavioral synchrony.
Bio-behavioral synchrony contributes to the
overall fluidity and rhythm of mother-infant interactions
So what would a synchronous interaction look
like?
Let’s put it into context.
A mom and infant are playing and the baby starts to get fussy
which increases their heart rate.
In response, the mom’s heart rate also goes
up and comforts using a softer tone of voice
and decreasing the intensity of the play.
As a result, the baby’s heart rate decreases
and becomes calmer and more content.
Finally mom’s heart rate goes down and they
go back to playing.
Additionally, interactions like these can
be disrupted by factors such as chronic stress.
Few studies have looked at how chronic stress
can influence both behavioral and physiological
synchrony of mother-infant interactions.
This study aims to fill this gap by examining
the association between chronic maternal stress
and bio-behavioral synchrony.
Thirty-three mothers and their 3 month old
infants from socio-economically diverse NYC
communities participated in our study.
From them, we collected heart rate while mother
and infant were playing together for five
minutes. We also coded for behavioral synchrony
based on their engagement.
Finally, mothers provided a small sample of
their hair that contains a hormone used to
measure stress from the past 3 months.
So what did we find?
We found that chronic stress was not related to behavioral synchrony
but was predictive of physiological synchrony.
Therefore, stress perhaps may not affect the
behavioral aspects of mother infant interactions,
but even as early as 3 months, stress impacts
the unobservable and physiological aspects of these interactions
I would like to thank my mentor Dr. Natalie
Brito and doctoral student Stephen Braren
for all of their help throughout this whole
honors process.
I would also like to thank Dr. Melzi, Dr.
Schick, Rachel and Vivi for spearheading this
virtual undergraduate conference and thank
you for watching.
If you have any questions, please leave it
in the comments below.
