Emotion regulation and sensitive caregiving in trauma-exposed mothers

Sensitive caregiving, or a caregiver's ability to notice and attend to infant signals, interpret them accurately, and respond to them in an appropriate and timely manner, sets the stage for positive trajectories of socioemotional development. Meta-analytic findings suggest that maternal experiences of interpersonal trauma, including histories of childhood maltreatment and intimate partner violence (IPV), are associated with less sensitive caregiving. However, the mechanisms linking women's experiences of interpersonal trauma to parenting behavior are not well understood. Maternal psychopathology and non-balanced maternal representations have been proposed as potential explanatory pathways, both of which share emotion regulation deficits as underlying features. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine whether self-report and physiological (high-frequency heart rate variability; HF-HRV) measures of emotion regulation mediate the associations between maternal experiences of interpersonal trauma and observed caregiving sensitivity. Additionally, current psychopathology and maternal representations were examined as potential moderators of this mediation pathway. The sample consisted of 370 women enrolled in the Michigan Prenatal Stress Study. Participants were oversampled for experiences of interpersonal violence. Assessments of demographic risk, childhood maltreatment, lifetime and pregnancy IPV, and maternal representations were completed during pregnancy. Measures of depression, PTSD, self-reported emotion regulation, baseline and stressed HF-HRV, and observed caregiving sensitivity were collected at 6-months postpartum. A series of structural equation models conducted in Mplus were used to test the study hypotheses. Contrary to expectations, although history of childhood maltreatment was associated with greater self-reported emotion regulation difficulties, neither childhood maltreatment nor IPV significantly predicted caregiving sensitivity directly or indirectly through self-reported emotion℗ regulation. Regarding physiological emotion regulation, childhood maltreatment was associated with less parasympathetic withdrawal during the stress task, which in turn was associated with less sensitive caregiving. The moderation hypotheses were not supported. Results suggest that early experiences of interpersonal trauma have lasting consequences for women's emotion regulation abilities, and physiological regulation in particular may have bearing on mothers' abilities to engage in sensitive caregiving. Results should be interpreted in the context of the specific methods used in the present study, and an important future direction will be to replicate these findings using a parenting task that is more demanding of mothers' emotion regulation resources. Lastly, cumulative demographic risk was a significant predictor of caregiving sensitivity, highlighting the importance of taking ecological/contextual factors into account when examining mechanisms of intergenerational transmission of risk.℗