When mothers and infants interact socially, they also interact on a physiological level, which can lead them to have attuned physiological reactions. However, studies have shown that chronic stressors may negatively affect attunement. One such stressor is intimate partner violence (IPV). In physiological attunement, the negative effect of a stressor like IPV may be seen in the dysregulated or exaggerated sympathetic nervous system (SNS) responses of mothers and their infants, which may make it more difficult for them to attune to one another. This study hypothesized that IPV would negatively affect SNS attunement such that dyads who experienced IPV both pre- and postnatally (chronic IPV) would be less attuned than dyads who did not. In addition, it was hypothesized that maternal warmth would have a positive relationship with attunement in dyads who experienced chronic IPV. IPV, maternal warmth and SNS reactivity (via salivary alpha amylase: sAA) were assessed during a laboratory stress task in 182 mother-infant dyads. IPV was assessed for both the pre- and postnatal periods. The attunement literature operationalizes and analyses attunement in several ways. Therefore, three multilevel modeling (MLM) analyses that correspond to three common conceptualizations of attunement were run to test each hypothesis. Overall, the results did not support the hypotheses, suggesting that IPV does not influence mother-infant SNS attunement. The results also suggest that the way in which attunement is conceptualized and analyzed may differentially affect results, which may help to explain the variation in outcomes in the mother-infant physiological attunement literature.
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