Assisting Mothers Suffering from Emotional Disorders to Bond with Their Infants
Anne Juul Bjertrup, a renowned researcher and psychologist at the University of Copenhagen, is delving into the intricate world of emotional cognitive processing, particularly focusing on pregnant women and mothers with and without affective disorders. Her work, conducted with the Neurocognition and Emotion in Affective Disorders (NEAD) Group, also seeks to understand the neurocognitive mechanisms involved in the intergenerational transmission of risk from mothers with affective disorders to their children.
Mothers suffering from depression and bipolar disorder exhibit maladaptive emotional cognitive biases that can significantly impact their ability to respond appropriately to infant emotions. These biases include heightened attention to negative infant emotions, such as sadness, diminished attention to positive emotional cues, such as happiness, and difficulties in emotion processing and coaching during mother-infant interactions.
These altered emotional attention patterns can lead to problematic mother-infant interactions, potentially contributing to poorer child developmental outcomes and increased infant internalizing behaviours. However, emerging interventions are offering hope. Biofeedback paradigms, using neurofeedback and attentional training techniques, are targeting these biases.
These paradigms aim to increase mothers' awareness of their emotional and attentional states in real time, train them to enhance their selective attention to positive and salient infant emotional signals, and modify maladaptive attentional biases by providing immediate feedback on brain activity or physiological signals associated with emotional attention. By capitalising on brain plasticity, these approaches could improve maternal emotional regulation and caregiving sensitivity, supporting improved mother-infant emotional synchrony.
While concrete clinical trial data on biofeedback with perinatal mood disorder mothers was not found in the search results, ongoing research suggests that such interventions are a promising direction to improve maternal emotional attention to infant signals.
In a forthcoming webinar, Bjertrup will discuss the use of biosensors to detect and train emotional cognitive processing, targeting researchers across fields interested in this exciting field. If you're keen to learn more about the detailed mechanisms of these paradigms or specific clinical protocols, stay tuned for further updates.
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