The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

College of the Liberal Arts

UNDERSTANDING PARENTING AS A PROCESS: FRONTAL EEG ALPHA

ASYMMETRY AS A MEASURE OF “ONLINE” MATERNAL RESPONSIVENESS

TO INFANT CUES

A Dissertation in

Psychology

by

Lauren A. Killeen

© 2010 Lauren A. Killeen

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

August 2010

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The dissertation of Lauren A. Killeen was reviewed and approved* by the following: Douglas M. Teti Professor of Human Development, Psychology, and Pediatrics Dissertation Advisor Co-Chair of Committee Pamela M. Cole Professor of Psychology Academic Advisor Co-Chair of Committee William J. Ray Professor of Psychology Ginger A. Moore Assistant Professor of Psychology Paul R. Amato Arnold and Bette Hoffman Professor of Family Sociology and Demography Melvin M. Mark Professor of Psychology Head of the Department of Psychology *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School

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ABSTRACT Parenting is widely regarded as a major contributor to child mental health, yet little is known about the processes that underlie parenting behaviors. The use of high-density EEG may allow unique insight into the complexity of mothers’ in-the-moment responses to their infants and emotional/motivational processes that can undermine competent parenting. The present study examined the links between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry as a trait measure (baseline condition), state measure (experimental conditions), and an index of ones capacity for emotional responding (shift in asymmetry from a baseline to an experimental condition) and maternal responsiveness. During continuous a EEG recording, mothers viewed videos of their own infants expressing joy, anger/distress, and neutral interest. Maternal responsiveness was conceptualized as self-reported experienced emotions in response to infant emotion displays, self-reported anxious and depressive symptoms, and observed emotional availability during mother-infant free-play interaction. Greater relative right frontal activity at baseline was associated with greater reported anxiety, but was unrelated to maternal responsiveness. Limited relations emerged between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during the experimental conditions (infant emotion videos) and maternal responsiveness. However, a shift toward greater relative right frontal activation was associated with maternal experience of sadness, concern, irritability, and a lack of joy in response to seeing ones own infant in distress, along with lower anxiety and adaptive parenting behaviors. These findings are suggestive of an empathetic maternal response. The shift in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry was driven by a decrease in left frontal activation from a baseline condition to the onset of the infant emotion videos. Implications of the study findings for conceptualizing parenting risk are discussed.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ..............................................................................................................vi LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................. ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.....................................................................................................x CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................1 Parenting as an Emotional Process ............................................................................4 Dix’s (1991) Model of the Affective Organization of Parenting ....................6 Parental Expressed Emotion and Child Outcomes .........................................8 Maternal Depression, Parenting, and Child Outcomes .................................. 10 “Online” Parenting Emotions ...................................................................... 13 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry and Emotion ......................................................... 18 Trait Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry and Trait-Like Measures ................... 19 Trait Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry and State-Dependent Change ............ 21 Trait Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry and Depression .................................. 22 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry as a State Measure ..................................... 25 Models of Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry and Emotion ............................. 27 Neural Correlates of Parenting ................................................................................ 32 The Current Study .................................................................................................. 37 Hypotheses ................................................................................................. 39 CHAPTER II. METHOD.................................................................................................... 53 Participants ............................................................................................................. 53 Procedure and Measures ......................................................................................... 54 Phase Ia – Elicitation of Infant Emotion ...................................................... 54 Phase Ib – Extraction of Infant Emotion Stimuli .......................................... 56 Phase Ic – Self-Reported Depressive and Anxious Symptoms ..................... 56 Phase II – Mother-Infant Free Play Interaction & Emotional Availability .... 57 Phase IIIa – EEG Data ................................................................................ 58 Phase IIIb – Maternal Self-Reported Emotional Experience and Perceptions of Infant Emotions ................................................. 63 CHAPTER III. RESULTS .................................................................................................. 65 Study Aim 1 ......................................................................................................... 65 1a. Frontal EEG activity............................................................................... 65 1b. Frontal EEG activation........................................................................... 66 1c. Frontal EEG trait vs. state ...................................................................... 68 1d. Moderation............................................................................................. 71 Study Aim 2 ......................................................................................................... 71 2a. Frontal EEG activity............................................................................... 71 2b. Frontal EEG activation........................................................................... 72 2c. Frontal EEG trait vs. state ...................................................................... 72 2d. Moderation............................................................................................. 74

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TABLE OF CONTENTS (CONTINUED) Study Aim 3 ......................................................................................................... 74 3a. Frontal EEG activity............................................................................... 74 3b. Frontal EEG activation........................................................................... 74 3c. Frontal EEG trait vs. state ...................................................................... 75 3d. Moderation............................................................................................. 77 Posthoc Analyses .................................................................................................... 77 Contributions of Individual Hemisphere Changes for Joy & Anger .............. 78 Contributions of Individual Hemisphere Changes for Neutral....................... 78 CHAPTER IV. DISCUSSION ........................................................................................... 79 “Affective Style” and Maternal Responsiveness ..................................................... 81 State-Dependent Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry & Maternal Responsiveness ....... 84 A Shift from Baseline to State-Dependent Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry & Maternal Responsiveness ............................................................................ 87 Medial vs. Lateral Findings ..................................................................................... 95 Limitations and Future Directions............................................................................ 98 Implications........................................................................................................... 101 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................. 104

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LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Participant Demographics ........................................................................... 122 Table 2: Frequency of Mothers Reporting “Yes” to Various Emotions During Infant Emotion Videos ................................................................................ 122 Table 3: Alpha Power by Infant Emotion Video and Hemisphere of EEG Recording....................................................................................... 122 Table 4: F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers’ Endorsement of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos ............................................................................ 123 Table 5: F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers’ Endorsement of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos ............................................................................ 124 Table 6: F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers’ Rating of Intensity of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos ............................................................................ 125 Table 7: F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers’ Rating of Intensity of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos ............................................................................ 126 Table 8: F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers’ Endorsement of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos – After Subtracting Asymmetry from Baseline .... 127 Table 9: F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers’ Endorsement of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos – After Subtracting Asymmetry from Baseline .... 128 Table 10: F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers’ Endorsement of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos – After Subtracting Asymmetry from Inter-Stimulus Blank Screens ...................................................................... 129 Table 11: F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers’ Endorsement of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos – After Subtracting Asymmetry from Inter-Stimulus Blank Screens ...................................................................... 130

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LIST OF TABLES (CONTINUED) Table 12: F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers’ Rating of Intensity of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos – After Subtracting Asymmetry from Baseline .... 131 Table 13: F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers’ Rating of Intensity of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos – After Subtracting Asymmetry from Baseline .... 132 Table 14: F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers’ Rating of Intensity of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos – After Subtracting Asymmetry from Inter-Stimulus Blank Screens ...................................................................... 133 Table 15: F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers’ Rating of Intensity of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos – After Subtracting Asymmetry from Inter-Stimulus Blank Screens ...................................................................... 134 Table 16: F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers’ Reported Anxious and Depressive Symptoms............................... 135 Table 17: F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers’ Reported Anxious and Depressive Symptoms............................... 135 Table 18: F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers’ Reported Anxious and Depressive Symptoms – After Subtracting Asymmetry from Baseline ........................................................ 136 Table 19: F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers’ Reported Anxious and Depressive Symptoms – After Subtracting Asymmetry from Baseline ........................................................ 136 Table 20: F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers’ Reported Anxious and Depressive Symptoms – After Subtracting Asymmetry from Inter-Stimulus Blank Screens ........................ 137 Table 21: F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers’ Reported Anxious and Depressive Symptoms – After Subtracting Asymmetry from Inter-Stimulus Blank Screens ........................ 137 Table 22: F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Observed Emotional Availability................................................................. 138

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LIST OF TABLES (CONTINUED) Table 23: F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Observed Emotional Availability................................................................. 138 Table 24: F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Observed Emotional Availability – After Subtracting Asymmetry From Baseline ............................................................................................. 139 Table 25: F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Observed Emotional Availability – After Subtracting Asymmetry From Baseline ............................................................................................. 139 Table 26: F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Observed Emotional Availability – After Subtracting Asymmetry From Inter-Stimulus Blank Screens ............................................................. 140 Table 27: F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Observed Emotional Availability – After Subtracting Asymmetry From Inter-Stimulus Blank Screens ............................................................. 140 Table 28: Summary of Study Findings for Baseline Condition .................................... 141 Table 29: Summary of Study Findings for Infant Emotion Videos .............................. 142

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: HydroCel Geodesic Sensor Net 128 Channel Map with Electrode Clusters Corresponding to F3, F4, F7, F8 of the International 20-10 System ............................................................................................. 143

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project reflects the input of so many people, both in front of and behind the scenes, and I would like to express my gratitude for their help and support. I am tremendously grateful for the mentorship of my dissertation advisor, Douglas Teti, who created the enriching academic environment within which this project took root. His thoughtful feedback, intellectual investment, time, support, and encouragement have truly promoted my growth as a scientist. My academic advisor, Pamela Cole, helped cultivate my academic and professional landscape at Penn State and beyond, and I am very grateful for her insight, openness, and direction. I would also like to thank my doctoral committee members, William Ray, Ginger Moore, and Paul Amato, for their enthusiasm for this project, diverse and exciting perspectives on family systems, and constructive feedback throughout the process. I would like to thank Keith Crnic and the members of the Parenting at Risk Initiative of the Child Study Center for giving me the opportunity to be a part of this unique and creative group, for sharing their contagious passion for the study of parenting and child development, and for their contributions to the framework for this project. Additionally, this study would never have come to fruition without the significant efforts of a dedicated, hard-working, and collaborative research team – Thank you, Mark Feinberg, Joe Stitt, Nissa Towe-Goodman, Christine Fortunato, Bo-Ram Kim, Nastassia Hajal, and Elizabeth Schwall. For instilling in me as a young girl the notion that I could achieve whatever I put my mind to, and for being among my biggest cheerleaders for the last three decades, I would very much like to thank my parents, Anna and Bill Killeen. During my years at Penn State, I was also very fortunate to be surrounded by a community of friends and a terrific cohort that understood the highs and lows of academic pursuits, and I am thankful for their support and camaraderie. I truly appreciate Marie, John, Jack, Cate, Grace, and Jane Lynch who adopted me during my internship year – the supportive, fun, boisterous, and warm home they provided was the perfect boost that helped “Auntie” complete this project. I am thankful for the folks at Linz & Vail who allowed me to sit in their shop for hours on end, week after week after week, while providing the best lattes and gelato that kept me fueled while I wrote! And finally, I am extremely grateful to my husband, John Trzupek, who knew me before I started down a career path in Psychology, and was my partner along a journey spanning 10 years and 5 cities, with 7 years of long-distance in-between. His love, humor, guidance, support, and belief in me were immeasurable and continually propelled me forward, whether we were face-to-face or 2,000 miles apart. Now, with the completion of this project, I am thankful to be finally coming home!

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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Parenting is widely regarded as a major contributor to child mental health, yet little is

known about the processes that underlie parenting behaviors. Advances in the use and

analysis of high-density electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings have offered tremendous

opportunity for advancing the field of affective neuroscience and developmental

psychopathology. In particular, the use of high-density EEG may allow unique insight into

the complexity of mothers’ in-the-moment responses to their infants and

emotional/motivational processes that can undermine competent parenting. As many

emotional processes occur very quickly and may be outside conscious awareness, methods

such as self-report, observation, and neurochemical analysis may not adequately capture the

complexity of maternal emotional responses (Papousek, Papousek, & Bornstein, 2002).

Furthermore, evidence for coherence among emotional response systems (Rosenberg &

Ekman, 2005), including self-reported emotion experience, observed behavior, and

physiological markers, is mixed (Mauss, Levenson, McCarter, Wilhelm, & Gross, 2005).

Modest to weak correlations across methods suggest that each technique may measure

related, yet distinct aspects of emotional responding. In contrast to the above limitations, the

high temporal resolution of EEG offers the unique capacity to detect covert processes in real

time, with tremendous potential to further elucidate parental emotional responding.

In the “Decade of the Brain,” investigators increasingly employed the methods of

affective neuroscience in examinations of family processes, in order to study parental

responsiveness to infant cues. However, no studies specifically examined parental emotional

/motivational responsiveness at the level of frontal EEG activity. Unique information

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obtained from this line of research can further explicate the neural correlates of parenting,

which may predispose the development of psychopathology in children. The current study

examined parental responsiveness at a micro-level of analysis – frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry – and linked it with parental responsiveness at a macro-level of analysis – self-

report of emotional experience, depressive and anxious symptomatology, and observed

maternal emotional availability.

Empirical investigations of frontal EEG alpha asymmetry suggest that hemispheric

alpha power asymmetry in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is related to emotional and

motivational response tendencies, which may have important implications for parenting. At

rest, relatively greater right frontal activity is associated with withdrawal tendencies, while

relatively greater left frontal activity is associated with approach tendencies. In response to

emotional stimuli, greater left frontal activation has been found in response to joy and anger,

and greater right frontal activation has been found in response to sadness or disgust (Coan &

Allen, 2004; Davidson, 2004). Although many EEG studies of emotion have examined

frontal hemispheric asymmetry within the alpha band (Allen, Urry, Hitt, & Coan, 2004; Coan

& Allen, 2003), the current study aimed to extend these findings into the domain of

emotional responding within the context of the mother-infant relationship. The current study

utilized video clips of mothers’ own infants displaying positive and negative emotions – a

more ecologically valid set of stimuli than still photographs or sound clips of infant

vocalizations, which have been the primary stimuli used in fMRI studies of maternal

responsiveness to date. Furthermore, a central goal of the present investigation was to

examine individual differences in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry as a function of maternal

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emotional availability, anxious and depressive symptom severity, and experienced emotions

in mothers of infants in their first year of life.

Maternal depression is known to place children at risk for social and emotional

problems, and can disrupt the development of secure emotional attachment in infants (Teti &

Towe-Goodman, 2010). Depression undermines competent parenting in that depressed

mothers are more inattentive, unresponsive, and less sensitive in caregiving than non-

depressed mothers. Additionally, they often fail to provide an adequately structured

environment for the child, and there is an absence of pleasure and positive affect within the

mother-child relationship (Gelfand & Teti, 1990). Given this risk to parenting competency,

further investigation of the nature of depression is critical in promoting healthy child

development. However, methodological complications contribute to the difficulty in this line

of research. Self-report of emotional experiences is likely biased in depressed samples, and

behavioral observations cannot accurately differentiate between the absence of emotional

experience and the behavioral regulation of an emotional experience. Examination of

mothers’ online emotional/motivational responding to child events, employing EEG

methodology, can aid our understanding of the precursors to maternal parenting behavior and

ultimately the conditions that place parenting at risk.

By examining the links between mothers’ frontal EEG alpha asymmetry responses to

their infants, depressive and anxious symptoms, and affective interactions in the parenting

context, findings from the current study have the potential to help clarify normative maternal

response to infant cues, detect maladaptive response patterns, and identify potential targets

for psychological intervention (Banaschewsk & Brandeis, 2007). Although the dispositional

withdrawal tendency seen in depressed mothers is known to be associated with greater right

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frontal activity, these processes have yet to be explored using mothers’ own infants as

emotional and behavioral elicitors. Furthermore, no study to date has examined the relations

between mothers’ online responding in this way and the quality of the parent-child emotional

relationship. Understanding parenting as a process – how online response patterns are elicited

by ongoing inputs from parents’ children – may help identify and contextualize risk and

protective factors in child mental health trajectories.

Parenting as an Emotional Process

Theory and empirical study identify the family as a central contributor to children’s

mental health (Belsky, 1984; Cox & Paley, 1997; Minuchin, 1985). Investigations of risk

conditions within the family have often focused on factors mainly within the parent, and how

these factors influence the parent-child emotional relationship and parenting competency.

Such factors include parental psychopathology (e.g. maternal depression and parental

substance abuse; (Conners et al., 2003; Field, 1986; Jameson, Gelfand, Kulcsar, & Teti,

1997; Teti & Gelfand, 1991), parental abuse (De Bellis, 2001; Paz, Jones, & Byrne, 2005),

and marital conflict and divorce (Amato & Keith, 1991; Grych & Fincham, 1990; McHale,

Kuersten, & Lauretti, 1996). However, we must move beyond a “family address model of

parenting” if we are to understand parenting as a process (Darling & Steinberg, 1993).

Investigation of parents’ emotional experiences in response to ongoing affective inputs from

their children may provide a window into the processes that can facilitate or undermine

competent parenting. Such a line of study can help elucidate and contextualize risk and

protective factors in child mental health trajectories.

In a seminal paper, Belsky (1984) introduced an ecological model of the determinants

of parenting that included contributions from the parent and child and contextual sources of

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social stress and support. In this model, parents’ developmental history influences parental

personality development, which subsequently influences the quality of and support from the

marital relationship, work life, and social networks. These factors in combination affect

parenting practices. Belsky (1984) briefly highlighted maternal depression as a critical

personality factor that could undermine parenting competency, and indeed much research

since that time has supported this hypothesis (Gelfand & Teti, 1990; Goodman, 2003). Since

Belsky’s (1984) paper however, theories on the determinants of parenting have increased in

complexity to include the influence of greater ecological contexts including diversity in

family structures and family cultures (Parke, Buriel, Damon, & Eisenberg, 1998),

neighborhood safety (Ceballo & McLoyd, 2002), and economic hardship (Conger, Conger,

Elder, & Lorenz, 1992; McLoyd, 1990). Additionally, the role of parental emotion has

emerged as a central focus in models of the determinants of parenting competence (Dix,

1991). Even so, empirical study on emotion in the parenting context has primarily examined

behavioral expression of emotion during parent-child interactions (e.g. observed facial

expressions), rather than emotions experienced by the parent in-the-moment (e.g. subjective

emotional experience). This is an important distinction as studies have demonstrated that

behavioral expression and self-reported experience of emotion are only moderately, if at all,

correlated (Martin, Clements, & Crnic, 2002; Rosenberg & Ekman, 2005). Such evidence

suggests that expressed and experienced emotion may tap related, yet distinct processes

occurring during parent-child interactions. Furthermore, the mechanism by which each

affects child development likely differs. For instance, expressed emotion during parent-child

interactions may directly influence child behavior and the child’s emotional experience,

whereas parental experienced emotion indirectly affects the child through its influence on

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parenting behaviors (i.e. emotional availability). Understanding parents’ quickly occurring

emotional reactions to their children, which may even be outside conscious awareness,

provides an initial step in understanding the determinants of competent parenting and the

factors that place parenting at risk.

Dix’s (1991) Model of the Affective Organization of Parenting. Dix’s (1991) analysis

of emotion and parenting placed emotion at the center of parenting competency. His 3-

component model of the affective organization of parenting emphasized the intersection of

parenting and child concerns in the generation of parental emotions, which subsequently

affect parenting behaviors. He proposed that (1) child, parent, and contextual factors elicit

parent emotions in relation to their childrearing goals and concerns (activation); (2) after they

are activated, emotions have organizing, orienting, and motivating effects on parents that

direct them to meet the needs of their children (engagement); and (3) parents regulate their

emotions in order to maintain a level of arousal that is within an optimal range for adaptive

parenting (regulation). Indeed, research on the antecedents of maternal cognitive and

affective responsiveness to infant cues has identified five “emotional competencies” (Leerkes

& Crockenberg, 2006) that contribute to competent parenting: (1) parental accuracy in

detecting infants’ emotions; (2) parental empathy; (3) parental negative emotion; (4) parental

sense of emotional efficacy in responding to infant distress; and (5) parental emotion goals

for the parent-infant interaction. These emotional competencies are independently related to

maternal sensitivity (Leerkes, Crockenberg, & Burrous, 2004), further supporting the Dix’s

(1991) proposition that emotion is at the core of facilitating sensitive responding within the

parent-child dyad. Given the prominent role of emotion in promoting parental competency, a

principal goal of the current study was to examine mothers’ emotional and motivational

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activation in response to child-created events – a primary step in Dix’s (1991) model of the

emotional determinants of parenting (activation) – and link these responses to patterns of

parental engagement (i.e. maternal emotional availability).

Emotion activation processes are those that determine which emotions occur, at what

time, and with what intensity. Cognitive appraisal of a child’s behavior as either facilitating

or hindering parents’ child-oriented concerns is key in the emotion activation process. Events

that are perceived as in conflict with parents’ child-oriented concerns may lead to negative

parental emotions, whereas those facilitating parents’ goals may give rise to positive parental

emotions. The specific positive and negative emotions that arise depend on the parents’

appraisal of the potential outcomes, obstacles, and supports available to them. Once an

emotion has been activated, it has orienting, organizing, and motivating properties. The

engagement phase in Dix’s (1991) model involves changes in cognition, physiology,

motivation, and behavior as a result of the specific activated emotion and its intensity. Dix

(1991) suggested that excessive or insufficient emotion activation might interfere with

optimal parenting practices. For instance, a lack of joy during positive parent-child

interactions or a lack of anxiety during child endangerment situations might underlie parental

withdrawal and neglect. An excess of parental anger during child transgressions might

underlie parental abuse. Although less common, an excess of positive emotion may also

interfere with adaptive parenting behaviors, particularly if the emotion is not matched to the

parent-child situation (Dix, 1991). In such a setting, one might see excess joy result in

parental intrusiveness.

Dix’s (1991) model of the affective organization of parenting provides a valuable

framework for the current study, focusing on emotion activation processes as a primary step

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in understanding competent parenting. The model, however, does not explicitly address

children’s emotion displays as the activating agent of parents’ emotional responses, and

instead focuses on child behavior (i.e. transgressions) as the activating agent. Children’s

emotional reactions to events are likely potent elicitors of empathetic emotional responses or

personal distress in parents. The current study employed infants’ emotional displays as the

activating agent for maternal emotional and motivational responding. Such a design permits a

differentiation between maternal empathetic concern (a negative emotion with a

hypothesized approach motivation), and personal distress (a negative emotion with a

hypothesized withdrawal motivation). It is likely that each might underlie different parenting

behaviors (e.g. soothing or withdrawal). Child behaviors are complex phenomena; by using

infant facial emotional expressions as the activating agent in the current study, we focused on

more specific aspects of child signaling thereby increasing the interpretability of maternal

response patterns.

Parental Expressed Emotion and Child Outcomes. Empirical investigations of

parenting and emotion have overwhelmingly focused on parents’ behavioral expressions of

emotion and its impact on the parent-child relationship and child functioning. Parents’

positive affect has repeatedly been associated with favorable outcomes in young children.

Mothers who express greater happiness than anger during interactions with their preschoolers

have children who do the same in their peer interactions (Denham, Mitchell-Copeland,

Strandberg, Auerbach, & Blair, 1997). Mothers who maintain positive emotion, even during

challenging tasks, have children who are rated as more adept at understanding emotions by

their teachers. Maternal positive affective displays are also associated with higher

sociometric ratings of children by their peers (Boyum & Parke, 1995; Cassidy, Parke,

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Butkovsky, & Braungart, 1992; Putallaz, 1987), more constructive strategies in emotionally

charged peer interactions (Garner & Spears, 2000), greater compliance and internalization of

family rules (Kochanska, Aksan, & Koenig, 1995), and the lowest rates of externalizing

behaviors in toddlers (Pettit & Bates, 1989). These relations between positive affect in

parenting and healthy child outcomes appear to hold across parents' race, ethnicity, family

structure, education, income, or gender (Amato & Fowler, 2002).

Conversely, parental negative affect has been repeatedly associated with unfavorable

outcomes in young children. In particular, maternal behavioral expressions and self-reported

experience of anger during parent-child interactions are associated with children’s difficulties

in peer interactions (Cummings, Zahn-Waxler, & Radke-Yarrow, 1981), deficits in play

skills with peers (Gottman & Katz, 1989), lack of confidence in challenging situations

(Crockenberg, 1987), withdrawn, nonassertive interaction style with peers (Denham,

Renwick, & Holt, 1991), anger reactions with peers (Garner & Estep, 2001) parent and

teacher reports of externalizing behaviors both concurrently and over time (Denham et al.,

2000), and exacerbation of child conduct problems (Cole, Teti, & Zahn-Waxler, 2003). The

role of parental anger appears to be most potent with children who are already at risk for

externalizing disorders (i.e. high frequency of behavior problems). Anger expression, even

when displayed by an unfamiliar adult and not directed at the child, can decrease age-

appropriate activities such as vocalizations, play, and exploration in toddlers (Jenkins,

Franco, Dolins, & Sewell, 1995). Furthermore, the effects of such anger displays may persist

during subsequent neutral interactions. This research is consistent with the empirical work on

marital conflict: children’s exposure to marital discord, even though not directed at the child,

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is highly distressing and results in negative child emotional responses that range from anger

to fear and sadness (Cummings et al., 1981; El-Sheikh, Cummings, & Goetsch, 1989).

Although negative emotional expressions by parents have been linked to a variety of

negative child outcomes, the lack of positive affect also has important implications for child

functioning. Olson, Bates, Sandy, and Lanthier (2000) found that mothers who provided low

maternal affectionate contact when their infants were 6 months of age, had teenagers who

were higher in externalizing behavior. In fact, a meta-analysis demonstrated that the lack of

positive, affectionate parent-child interactions was the most powerful predictor of child

conduct problems, above and beyond ineffective, harsh parenting (Loeber & Stouthamer-

Loeber, 1986). Infants as young as 10 weeks of age have been shown to differentially

respond to maternal joy, anger, and sadness (Haviland & Lelwica, 1987). Furthermore, their

responses seem to implicate a change in state as evidenced by sustained interest over multiple

presentations of joy, freezing or looking away from angry maternal faces, and mouthing, self-

soothing behaviors during maternal sadness. Thus, it is clear that maternal emotional

expression can shape infant emotional experiences in positive and negative ways in even

very young infants.

Maternal Depression, Parenting, and Child Outcomes. Emotions in the parenting

context may directly influence child functioning through the modeling of emotion-related

skills and emotional contagion, or indirectly by undermining parental competence. The

empirical support for the role of maternal depression in parenting competence and child

functioning is perhaps one of the richest databases of information demonstrating how

emotions within the parenting context can place parenting at risk. Depression is a disorder of

emotion and emotion regulation abilities (Cummings & Davies, 1994; Dix, 1991; Downey &

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Coyne, 1990) that has both direct and indirect effects on child development. Directly,

exposure to chronic negative mood has implications for child development (summarized

above). Indirectly, depression affects the cognitions, emotions, and behaviors of parents that

subsequently shape child developmental trajectories. Of further consequence, maternal

depression is associated with marital distress and conflict – a stressor that impacts parenting

capacities and child development in the short term (Downey & Coyne, 1990; Erel & Burman,

1995; Rutter & Quinton, 1984) and well-being in the long term (Amato, 2006).

Depressed mothers are more inattentive, unresponsive, and less sensitive in

caregiving than non-depressed mothers; they often fail to provide an adequately structured

environment for the child, and there is an absence of pleasure and positive affect within the

mother-child relationship (Gelfand & Teti, 1990). Maternal depression is known to place

children at risk for social and emotional problems, disrupt the development of secure

emotional attachment in infants, and undermine adaptive parenting (Teti & Towe-Goodman,

2010). Additionally, the social interactions of depressed persons are often characterized by

poor eye contact, slow and infrequent speech (Gotlib, 1982), facial expressions of negative

emotion, reduced motor activity, dysphoria, irritability, and hostility (Gelfand & Teti, 1990).

Such interaction styles disrupt the formation of positive relationships and undermine the

formation of healthy parent-child attachment relationships. Indeed, in face-to-face

interactions, depressed persons have been shown to evoke negative reactions from their

infants (Cohn & Campbell, 1992) as well as from strangers (Coyne, 1976).

Numerous depressive cognitions appear to contribute to parenting difficulties:

pessimistic views of the self and others are characteristic depressive symptoms (Beck, 1976).

Teti and Gelfand (1991) found that when mothers’ sense of self-efficacy in their parenting

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role is compromised by depression, their actual parenting abilities are more likely to be

negatively affected. The negative perceptions of ones parenting competence can adversely

influence mothers’ ability to consistently and positively respond to their children, especially

during demanding child situations (e.g. child noncompliance; Bugental & Cortez, 1988). In

addition to negative self-perceptions, depressed parents also hold more negative views of

their children than non-depressed parents (Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979). Such

negative views of the child may directly contribute to reduced child self-esteem if expressed

by the parent, but may also indirectly influence child functioning by narrowing parents’

attentional focus to and exacerbating their perception of negative child behaviors. Indeed,

maternal depression has been related to anger, overly harsh discipline strategies (Shay &

Knutson, 2008), and coercive processes whereby negative parent-child interactions serve to

maintain and exacerbate child behavior problems (Cummings & Davies, 1999; Patterson,

2002). Conversely, the increased self-absorption, preoccupation, and inattention to child cues

often displayed by depressed mothers may lead to lax, undercontrol of child problem

behaviors (Gelfand & Teti, 1990). Thus, maternal depression has been linked to overall

difficulties in effective child management strategies.

Numerous empirical investigations have also demonstrated a link between maternal

depression and insecure parent-child attachment (De Wolff & van Ijzendoorn, 1997; Radke-

Yarrow, Cummings, Kuczynski, & Chapman, 1985; Teti, Gelfand, Messinger, & Isabella,

1995), which, in turn, has implications for increased risk of child maladjustment. Sensitive

parenting, generally characterized as empathetic, aware, and responsive parenting, is strongly

associated with secure parent-child attachment relationships (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, &

Wall, 1978; Lamb, 1987), while insensitive, emotionally unavailable parenting is linked to

13

insecure parent-child attachment relationships (Ainsworth et al., 1978; De Wolff & van

Ijzendoorn, 1997). Maternal depression appears to undermine the formation of a secure

attachment relationship due to deficits in parental sensitivity. For instance, Cohn, Matias,

Tronick, Connell, and Lyons-Ruth (1986) identified two parent-child interaction styles that

typified interactions with a depressed mother: (1) flat affect, reduced activity, and reduced

contingent responding; and (2) alternation between withdrawal and intrusion. Such

interaction styles suggest that maternal depression has undermined mothers’ capacities for

responsiveness to and warmth toward their child, resulting in decreased monitoring and a

lack of awareness of their children’s needs.

Maternal depression during infancy has been linked to a three- to four-fold increased

risk of disorganized-disoriented attachment style during the preschool period (Teti et al.,

1995). Given this risk to parenting competency and healthy parent-child emotional bonds,

further investigation of the nature of depression is critical in promoting healthy child

development. However, methodological complications contribute to the difficulty in this line

of research. Self-report of emotional experiences are likely to be biased in depressed

samples, and behavioral observations cannot accurately differentiate between the absence of

emotional experience and the behavioral regulation of an emotional experience. Utilizing

EEG methodology to examine mothers’ online responses to child events can aid our

understanding of the precursors to maternal parenting behavior, and ultimately the conditions

that place parenting at risk.

“Online” Parenting Emotions. Parents’ emotions are the barometer for the quality of

the parent-child relationship and have important implications for healthy child development

(Emde & Easterbooks, 1985). Parental positive emotion has become a defining feature of

14

adaptive parenting styles (Baumrind, 1971; Maccoby & Martin, 1983) and sensitive

parenting (Ainsworth et al., 1978; Bowlby, 1969). Parenting that is sensitive, warm,

supportive, responsive, child-oriented, and emotionally synchronous is typically associated

with positive outcomes in children including emotional security, prosocial behavior, self-

regulatory abilities, and intellectual achievement (Cummings & Davies, 1996; Eisenberg et

al., 2006; van Ijzendoorn, Dijkstra, & Bus, 1995). Furthermore, some evidence suggests that

it is sensitivity specifically to infant distress that promotes positive child outcomes (Leerkes,

Blankson & O’Brien, 2009). Parenting that is characterized by warmth and sensitivity has

also been linked to the development of secure parent-child attachment relationships

(Easterbrooks, Biesecker, & Lyons-Ruth, 2000; Robinson & Spieker, 1996). Despite the

extensive body of empirical work examining warm, responsive parenting and healthy

emotional parent-child relationships, the mechanism by which competent parenting emerges

is often neglected. In other words, we know relatively little about the emotions parents

experience “in-the-moment,” during parent-child interactions, and how those emotions may

promote or undermine competent parenting. In order to understand why some parents

consistently use effective, positive parenting practices across a range of parenting situations

while others do not, we must first understand the emotions that are activated during parenting

events. Despite the vast literature on the role of emotion in the quality of the parent-child

relationship and healthy child development, investigations of “online” parenting emotion are

rare. A few key exceptions, however, support Dix’s (1991) model of parenting in which

emotion is a potent determinant of parenting competency. These studies deserve a more

detailed discussion as they directly relate to the current study of mothers’ online responding

15

to their infants (Dix, Gershoff, Meunier, & Miller, 2004; Lorber & Slep, 2005; Martin et al.,

2002).

In general, mothers tend to express predominantly positive emotions during play

interactions with their children, and a greater range of emotions, from positive to negative,

during more challenging tasks (Martin et al., 2002). Martin et al. (2002) found that maternal

self-reported negative emotion during a challenging parent-child task was inversely

associated with child displays of positive affect, suggesting interdependence between mother

and child emotion. Although much empirical study has focused on the role of parental

emotional expression as a predictor of concurrent and long-term child competencies, the

transactional nature of emotion within the parent-child dyad is recognized as a crucial

component in children’s emerging regulatory abilities (Cohn & Tronick, 1988; Cole et al.,

2003; Tronick, 1989). Cole et al. (2003) found that mothers typically displayed neutral

emotional expressions in interactions with their preschoolers, and that almost 93% of

codeable maternal emotion displays were in response to an expression of child emotion.

Similarly, Mayes, Carter, Egger, and Pajer (1991) found that mothers reported negative affect

in response to their child’s negative affect during the Still Face Paradigm (Tronick, Als,

Adamson, Wise, & Brazelton, 1978), an observational procedure in which mothers maintain

an affectively neutral face during interaction with their child after engaging the child in play.

Child emotion displays appear to be potent elicitors of maternal emotion and thus the current

study used positive, neutral, and negative emotional displays from mothers’ own infants as

elicitors of maternal emotional and motivational responding. Interestingly, Cole et al. (2003)

also found differential relations between self-reported and expressed emotion according to

child gender. Self-reported maternal anger was related to mothers’ expressed anger only with

16

their daughters. Similarly, Martin et al. (2002) also found no relation between mothers’ self-

reported emotion and their emotional displays during interactions with their child, suggesting

that self-reported and displayed parental emotion may tap different parenting processes.

Martin et al. (2002) found that maternal emotion moderated the relation between family

stress and maternal sensitivity in that family stress predicted less sensitive caregiving when

mothers experienced parent-child interactions less positively/more negatively. The

association did not hold for mothers who experienced parent-child interactions more

positively/less negatively. Parents’ experienced emotions during parenting events are a key

determinant in family health and positive child development. The affective neuroscience

methods employed in the current study offered an exciting opportunity to extend our

knowledge of mothers’ emotional and motivational responding to their own infants beyond

self-report and observation of emotions.

In another rare study that attempted to capture “online” parenting emotion, mothers

continuously rated their emotions while watching previously recorded video of their

interaction with their 1-year-old child (Dix, Gershoff, Meunier, & Miller, 2004). Using a dial

that rotated from a high degree of positive emotion to a high degree of negative emotion,

mothers shifted the dial during the video to capture what they had felt during the interaction,

and then verbally reported on the specific emotion they had experienced in that moment in

the video (see Gottman & Levenson, 1985). Dix et al. (2004) found that during times of

maternal reported guilt, interest, and joy, mothers expressed more child-oriented concerns

and displayed less asynchronous (more supportive) interactions with their child. Conversely,

during times of maternal reported sadness, worry, relief, and anger, mothers experienced

fewer child-oriented concerns and displayed more asynchronous (less supportive)

17

interactions with their child. Additionally, greater depressive symptoms in this non-clinical

sample were related to a decrease in child-oriented concerns, an increase in reported negative

emotion, and a decrease in reported positive emotion. Maternal emotional experiences during

parenting events appear to underlie supportive parenting. Interestingly, Lorber and Slep

(2005) found that when mothers’ emotions were highly dependent on their child’s

expressions of negative emotion, mothers utilized more ineffective (harsh and/or lax)

discipline strategies. However, mothers’ emotional dependence on their child’s rule-breaking

behavior was unrelated to mothers’ discipline strategies. Such findings lend further support

to the notion that child affective cues are a powerful trigger of maternal emotional responses,

which subsequently affect parental behavioral responses.

These studies of online parenting emotion have advanced our view of parenting as a

process, but have important limitations. First, mothers’ self-report of emotional experiences

during parent-child interactions were completed after the parent-child interaction, allowing

mothers time to reflect on their emotions and behaviors. Furthermore, mothers may have

used their own behavioral emotion cues from the video to report on their experienced

emotions and their intensity during the video-mediated recall procedures. It is unclear what

effects this may have had on the relation between parents’ experienced emotions, observed

emotions, and parenting behaviors. Lastly, such procedures are unable to assess the degree to

which parents are regulating their emotions during interactions with their children. Adults

are capable of altering their reports or behavioral expressions of emotion in social situations

as a function of their personality characteristics and personal goals, or in an attempt to

comply with social display rules (Saarni, 1993). The current study used dynamic infant

emotion cues – video clips of mothers’ own infants expressing various emotions – as the

18

eliciting stimuli for mothers’ emotional and motivational responding. Mothers’ frontal EEG

alpha activity, which presumably taps emotion processing and motivational tendencies, was

assessed and subsequently linked to mothers’ self-reported emotional experience, depressive

and anxious symptoms, and observations of maternal emotional availability.

Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry and Emotion

EEG pioneers, Hallowell and Pauline Davis, Fred and Erma Gibbs, and William

Lennox, are credited as the founders of clinical encephalography with their discovery of the

alpha rhythm and brainwave activity associated epilepsy in the mid-1930s (Schmitt, 1994).

Pauline Davis (1941) was among the first to systematically describe and interpret EEG

recordings in normal and abnormal individuals, and described normal alpha activity to be

within the 8.5-12 Hz frequency range. Before a review of the empirical evidence linking

prefrontal cortical (PFC) EEG asymmetry in the alpha bandwidth and emotion-related

constructs, it is first necessary to address and clarify several key issues in the interpretation of

hemispheric alpha asymmetry. First, in recent work, the alpha bandwidth has been defined as

8-13 Hz in adults (Pizzagalli, 2007), and thus this range was used in the current study. Alpha

power is inversely related to cortical activity, and therefore an increase in alpha power

reflects a decrease in cortical activity (see Ray, 1990). As is conventional in the literature on

PFC hemispheric asymmetry, alpha asymmetry findings will be discussed in the current

study in terms of cortical activity, and not alpha power per se. It follows that decreases in

alpha power in the left or right hemisphere will be described as increases in cortical activity

in those hemispheres. Additionally, asymmetry calculations are computed by subtracting the

natural log of alpha power in the left hemisphere from the natural log of alpha power in the

right hemisphere (ln[right alpha] – ln[left alpha]). Therefore, positive asymmetry values

19

reflect greater left frontal activity (greater right frontal alpha power), and negative values

reflect greater right frontal activity (greater left frontal alpha power). Lastly, following the

recommendation of Coan and Allen (2004), the current study will use the term activity to

refer to EEG data collected from participants during rest or a baseline condition, and

activation to refer to EEG data collected during emotional stimulus presentations. Given this

distinction, EEG activity is most closely associated with alpha asymmetry as a trait measure,

and EEG activation is most closely associated with alpha asymmetry as a state measure.

A vast body of literature examining the association between prefrontal cortical (PFC)

asymmetry in electroencephalographic (EEG) activity and patterns of emotional/motivational

responding has accumulated in recent decades. These empirical investigations can be

categorized as falling into one of the following four categories: (1) studies examining trait

frontal EEG alpha asymmetry and other trait-like measures; (2) studies examining trait

frontal EEG alpha asymmetry as a predictor of state-dependent changes; (3) studies

examining trait frontal EEG alpha asymmetry as a correlate or risk factor for

psychopathology; and (4) studies of state frontal EEG alpha asymmetry (Coan & Allen,

2003, 2004)

Trait Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry and Trait-Like Measures. Studies that examine

trait frontal EEG alpha asymmetry in relation to other trait-like measures have spanned a

wide range of human qualities including the Behavioral Inhibition/Activation System

(BIS/BAS; Sutton & Davidson, 1997), positive/negative emotionality (Tomarken, Davidson,

Wheeler, & Doss, 1992a), social competence (Fox et al., 1995), dispositional anger

(Hagemann et al., 1999), infants with intrusive vs. withdrawn mothers (Jones et al., 1997),

defensive coping styles (Kline, Allen, & Schwartz, 1998), well-being (Urry et al., 2004),

20

emotion regulatory abilities (Curtis & Cicchetti, 2007) and even attachment styles (Rognoni,

Galati, Costa, & Crini, 2008). The trait-like quality of frontal EEG alpha asymmetry at rest

has been called “affective style” by Davidson (1998), and can be conceptualized as a

predisposition to respond in a particular way to environmental stimuli; a potential diathesis

for the development of psychopathology. Indeed, frontal EEG alpha asymmetry at rest has

demonstrated high internal consistency (Cronbach’s alphas from .81-.90) and acceptable test-

retest stability (intraclass correlations from .53-.84), supporting its status as a trait

(Tomarken, Davidson, Wheeler, & Kinney, 1992b). Davidson’s “affective style” model of

frontal EEG alpha asymmetry will be discussed in further detail in a subsequent section.

The current review will address a number of particularly interesting findings that have

contributed to our understanding of the nature of frontal EEG alpha asymmetry at rest.

Perhaps most notably, trait frontal EEG alpha asymmetry has been consistently linked to

Carver and White’s (1994) BIS/BAS Scales, which were designed to assess Gray’s (1987)

behavioral inhibition and activation systems. To briefly summarize, Gray (1987) proposed

that two independent, yet interactive mechanisms contribute to personality. The behavioral

activation system (BAS) is sensitive to reward and is motivated to seek reward. The

behavioral inhibition system (BIS) is sensitive to punishment and is motivated to avoid

punishment. Sutton and Davidson (1997) demonstrated that greater left frontal EEG activity

was associated with higher BAS scores, and greater right frontal EEG activity was associated

with higher BIS scores, thus supporting an approach/withdrawal model of frontal EEG

asymmetry. Additionally, empirical investigations have demonstrated that individuals with

left frontal EEG activity reported greater dispositional positive affect and less dispositional

negative affect than individuals with right frontal EEG activity, as measured by the Positive

21

and Negative Affective Schedule (PANAS; Jacobs & Snyder, 1996; Tomarken et al., 1992a).

These investigations support an approach motivation-positive emotion association with left

frontal activity, and a withdrawal motivation-negative emotion association with right frontal

activity. A discussion of the conceptual models that have emerged to account for these

findings follows.

Trait Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry and State-Dependent Change. In an extension

of the empirical literature of trait frontal EEG alpha asymmetry and trait-like measures,

frontal EEG alpha asymmetry at rest has also been found to be a predictor of state-dependent

emotional responses. Thus, “affective style” appears to be a reliable predictor of an

individual’s emotional response during an emotional situation. This limited body of research

has mainly focused on infants’ response to maternal separation (Davidson & Fox, 1989; Fox,

Bell, & Jones, 1992) and subjective emotional experience in response to emotional stimuli

presentations (Allen, Harmon-Jones, & Cavender, 2001; Tomarken, Davidson, & Henriques,

1990; Wheeler, Davidson, & Tomarken, 1993). Infants who cry in response to maternal

separation have been shown to display greater right frontal EEG activity at rest than infants

who do not cry during separation (Davidson & Fox, 1989), and this pattern is stable over a 5-

month period (Fox et al., 1992). In the adult literature, individuals with greater right frontal

EEG activity at rest respond to negative film clips with a greater intensity of negative

emotion, and individuals with greater left frontal EEG activity at rest respond to positive film

clips with a greater intensity of positive emotion (Tomarken et al., 1990; Wheeler et al.,

1993). Thus, affective style appears to tap a propensity to respond in a particular way given

an emotional situation, and may serve as a diathesis for affective disorders (Davidson, 1998).

The current study attempted to extend these findings into the domain of intimate

22

relationships by examining the association between trait frontal EEG alpha asymmetry in

mothers and mothers’ subjective emotional responses after viewing affective video clips of

their own infants.

Trait Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry and Depression. Given Davidson’s (1998)

theory that trait frontal EEG asymmetry may serve as a diathesis for the development of

affective disorders, a substantial body of literature has examined the association between trait

frontal EEG alpha asymmetry (EEG alpha asymmetry at rest) and symptoms of depression

and anxiety. Investigations of adults with depressive symptoms, clinically depressed adults,

and infants of depressed mothers all support the proposition that greater right frontal

activation is associated with depressive symptomatology. In fact, a recent meta-analysis

(Thibodeau, Jorgensen, & Kim, 2006) found that depressive symptoms have a moderate-

sized association with right frontal EEG activity, with mean weighted effect sizes ranging

from .54 for adult studies to .61 for infant studies (Cohen, 1987).

Schaffer, Davidson, and Saron (1983) were among the first to examine the relation

between depressive symptoms and alpha asymmetry in the prefrontal cortex. They compared

individuals who scored high and low on the Beck Depression Inventory (Beck, Ward,

Mendelson, Mock, & Erbaugh, 1961) and found that high-scorers exhibited greater right

frontal activity at rest than low-scorers. This pattern of findings has been often replicated,

though some studies have failed to find frontal EEG alpha asymmetry differences between

depressed and non-depressed individuals (e.g. Reid, Duke, & Allen, 1998). Additionally,

depressed individuals appear to spend a greater percentage of the EEG recording baseline

period with right frontal activity as compared to non-depressed individuals (Baehr,

Rosenfeld, Baehr, & Earnest, 1998). Even previously depressed individuals who are not

23

currently depressed show less left frontal activity in comparison to never-depressed

individuals, and the current and previously depressed groups do not significantly differ from

each other (Gotlib, Ranganath, & Rosenfeld, 1998; Henriques & Davidson, 1990, 1991).

These findings suggest that frontal EEG alpha asymmetries in depressed individuals are

stable over time. Indeed, recent investigations have found adequate reliability in alpha

asymmetry patterns in clinically depressed individuals (Allen et al., 2004), with intraclass

correlations ranging from .56-.61 from 3 to 5 occasions of measurement. In fact, up to 60%

of the variance in alpha asymmetry at baseline is stable in this clinical population, which is

comparable to findings in non-clinical samples (Hagemann, Naumann, Thayer, & Bartussek,

2002; Tomarken et al., 1992b). Furthermore, such stability is maintained across time

regardless of sex, severity of depression, or history of depression (Vuga et al., 2006). Given

the stability of right frontal activation in depressed individuals over time and the fact that not

all individuals with a pattern of right frontal EEG activity at rest are depressed, frontal EEG

asymmetry appears to serve as a diathesis for the development of depression. A pattern of

right frontal EEG activity at rest may place an individual at increased risk for the

development of depression, given certain environmental stressors.

Data from depression treatment studies further support the association between right

frontal activity and depressive symptoms. Depressed individuals who subsequently

responded to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), as indexed by self-reported

improvement on the Clinical Global Impression Improvement Scale (CGI-I), had greater left

frontal EEG activity during baseline prior to treatment than those who were non-responders,

even though alpha asymmetry did not change over the course of the 12 week treatment

program (Bruder et al., 2008; Bruder et al., 2001). Thus, left frontal EEG activity at rest may

24

be a marker for those individuals who will respond positively to pharmacological

interventions for depression. Even non-traditional treatments such as music and massage

therapy with depressed adolescents and infants of depressed mothers have demonstrated

attenuation of right frontal EEG activity (Jones & Field, 1999; Jones, Field, & Davalos,

1998a) during treatment.

Empirical investigation of frontal EEG alpha asymmetry in infants of depressed

mothers has further enriched our understanding of the EEG correlates of depressive

symptomatology. Numerous studies have demonstrated that infants of depressed mothers

have lower left frontal EEG activity than infants of non-depressed mothers at rest (Dawson,

Frey, Panagiotides, & Osterling, 1997; Field, Fox, Pickens, & Nawrocki, 1995; Jones et al.,

1998b), during interactions with their mothers, or even during interactions with a familiar,

non-depressed adult (Dawson et al., 1999). This pattern held more for withdrawn-depressed

mothers than intrusive-depressed mothers (Diego, Field, Jones, & Hernandez-Reif, 2006).

Lastly, investigations of frontal EEG alpha asymmetry and anxiety have been mixed,

with some studies demonstrating that greater relative right frontal activation is associated

with anxiety traits (Sutton and Davidson, 1997, Tomarken et al., 1992) while others have not

demonstrated this link (Coan & Allen, 2003; Harmon-Jones & Allen, 1997; Tomarken &

Davidson, 1994). Heller and colleagues’ distinction between “anxious arousal” and “anxious

apprehension,” with the former involving physiological arousal and hyper-reactivity under

panic conditions, and the latter involving worry and verbal rumination, may account for this

variability in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry findings regarding anxiety (Nitschke, Heller,

Palmieri & Miller, 1999; Heller, Nitschke, Etienne & Miller, 1997). In fact, a recent

examination of this framework by Mathersul, Williams, Hopkinson, and Kemp (2008)

25

demonstrated that right frontal activity during a baseline condition was associated with

higher anxious arousal, whereas left frontal activity was associated with higher anxious

apprehension.

The current study attempted to extend the present state of the literature on the

association between maternal depressive and anxious symptoms and frontal EEG asymmetry

by examining such patterns within the context of the mother-child relationship, using

ecologically valid stimuli of mothers’ own infants displaying positive and negative emotions.

Thus, the present investigation not only examined a trait measure of EEG asymmetry in

association with past and current depressive symptoms, but also a state measure of EEG

asymmetry, using highly relevant child stimuli. Conducting investigations that examine

responses during emotionally demanding tasks is particularly suited for understanding

parenting as a process; mothers’ responses during emotionally taxing situations may yield

important information to aid in the detection of markers for maternal depression beyond

affective style alone.

Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry as a State Measure. Studies involving the

examination of frontal EEG alpha asymmetry as a state rather than trait measure have

demonstrated that changes in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry can be elicited through emotional

paradigms such as voluntary facial expressions (Coan, Allen, & Harmon-Jones, 2001),

emotional films (Davidson, Ekman, Saron, Senulis, & Friesen, 1990), stranger vs. mother

approach with infants (Fox & Davidson, 1987), and pleasant vs. unpleasant odors (Kline,

Blackhart, Woodward, Williams, & Schwartz, 2000). Whereas investigations of trait frontal

EEG alpha asymmetry examine an individual’s predisposition to respond in an expected way

across situations, investigations of state frontal EEG alpha asymmetry examine patterns of

26

response that are specific to a situation. For example, early studies demonstrated that infants

respond to videos of an actress performing a happy face with increased left frontal EEG

activation (Davidson & Fox, 1982). Furthermore, infants who reach for their mothers during

an approach task displayed concomitant left frontal EEG activation, whereas infants who

cried during maternal separation displayed concomitant right frontal EEG activation (Fox &

Davidson, 1987). In studies with adults, Ekman and Davidson (1993) found that when

individuals perform genuine, Duchenne smiles (smiles that utilize the obicularis pars lateris

muscle) they show greater concurrent left frontal EEG activation than when they perform

“unfelt” smiles. Similarly, voluntary facial expressions corresponding to withdrawal-oriented

emotions (disgust, fear) are associated with reduced left frontal EEG activation (Coan, Allen,

& Harmon-Jones, 2001). The work of Harmon-Jones and colleagues, discussed in further

detail below, has consistently demonstrated that anger, an approach-negative emotion, is

associated with increased left frontal EEG activation (e.g. Harmon-Jones, Sigelman, Bohlig,

& Harmon-Jones, 2003). Such evidence supports the proposition that environmental

situations that evoke approach tendencies are associated with left frontal EEG activation, and

environmental situations that evoke withdrawal tendencies are associated with right frontal

EEG activation. The current study examined mothers’ frontal EEG activation during the

presentation of emotional video clips of their own infants and connected these patterns to

mothers’ subjective emotional experiences, depressive and anxious symptoms, and emotional

availability during parent-infant interaction. Investigations of this nature provide a window

into mothers’ online affective and motivational responses to a range of emotional expressions

from their infants – highly salient and relevant stimuli in the investigation of parenting as a

process.

27

Across all four categories of frontal EEG alpha asymmetry and emotion studies

discussed above, it is important to note that a substantial number examine frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry as a dependent variable with emotion-related constructs as the grouping or

independent variable. Findings from such a design warrant different interpretations than

those in which frontal EEG alpha asymmetry is treated as an independent variable, with

emotion-related constructs as the dependent variable. When frontal EEG alpha asymmetry is

examined as an independent variable, interpretations are framed as variations in a

psychological event (ψ), given variations in a physiological event (φ); P(ψ/φ) – a “bottom-

up” approach. Thus, we aim to understand the neural substrates of psychological phenomena.

When frontal EEG alpha asymmetry is examined as a dependent variable, interpretations are

framed as variations in a physiological event (φ), given a psychological event (ψ); P(φ/ψ) – a

“top-down” approach. Thus, we aim to understand the psychological substrates of neural

phenomena. It is important to note that P(ψ/φ) is not necessarily equal to P(φ/ψ) (Sarter,

Berntson, & Cacioppo, 1996). The current study aimed to understand variations in self-

reported emotional experience, depressive and anxious symptomatology, and maternal

emotional availability (ψ), given variations in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry at rest and

during emotional stimulus presentations (φ). Thus, the current study conceptualized frontal

EEG alpha asymmetry as a diathesis for parenting at risk: the design of the current study

followed accordingly (P(ψ/φ)).

Models of Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry and Emotion. Several conceptual models

have been proposed to explain the extensive empirical evidence that prefrontal cortical

asymmetry in the alpha bandwidth is reliably associated with emotion and motivation

constructs. However, in almost all studies, emotion and motivational tendencies are

28

confounded; that is to say that only approach-positive emotions (e.g. joy) and withdrawal-

negative emotions (e.g. disgust) were utilized. Thus, several different models appeared to

account for the empirical evidence. For instance, the valence model (Gotlib et al., 1998;

Heller, 1990; Heller, Nitschke, & Miller, 1998; Silberman & Weingartner, 1986) purported

that left frontal activity was associated with the experience and expression of positive

emotion, and that right frontal activity was associated with the experience and expression of

negative emotion. Instead, the motivational direction model (Davidson, Jackson, & Kalin,

2000; Fox, 1991; Harmon-Jones & Allen, 1997; Sutton & Davidson, 1997) purported that

motivational tendencies better accounted for the hemispheric lateralization findings such that

left frontal EEG activity was associated with the experience and expression of approach

motivation, and that right frontal EEG activity was associated with the experience and

expression of withdrawal motivation. Finally, the valenced motivational model (Davidson,

1998; Tomarken & Keener, 1998) purported that left frontal activity was associated with the

experience and expression of approach-positive emotions, and that right frontal activation

was associated with the experience and expression of withdrawal-negative emotions, without

addressing the possible patterns associated with emotions that violate such pairings (e.g. the

approach-negative emotion, anger).

In an innovative body of work, Harmon-Jones and colleagues began to investigate

frontal EEG alpha asymmetry and the experience of anger. Harmon-Jones and Allen (1998)

found that dispositional anger in middle school children, as measured by the Aggression

Questionnaire (Buss & Perry, 1992), was associated with greater left frontal EEG activity at

rest. Considering that some individuals may regard anger as a positive emotion, thus

accounting for the left frontal EEG activity findings, a follow-up study (Harmon-Jones,

29

2007) revealed that this association held after controlling for participants’ attitudes toward

anger. These findings supported the motivational direction model of frontal EEG asymmetry

in that left frontal activation is most closely associated with approach motivation, regardless

of the valence of the emotion. Furthermore, experienced anger with an action potential is

associated with greater left frontal EEG activation than experienced anger with no potential

for action (Harmon-Jones et al., 2003). In this well-designed study, college students who

were opposed to a tuition increase heard a radio editorial that favorably discussed increasing

tuition at their university. Those participants who believed they could take action against the

increase by signing a petition had greater levels of self-reported anger and increased left

frontal EEG activation than those individuals who believed the tuition increase had already

occurred. Thus, the action (approach) potential appeared to account for the left frontal EEG

activation in participants and not the experience of anger per se. Furthermore, approach-

oriented stimuli that are highly relevant to an individual appear to produce greater left frontal

EEG activation than those that are less relevant (Harmon-Jones, Lueck, Fearn, & Harmon-

Jones, 2006). The current study utilized the highly relevant stimuli of mothers’ own infants

expressing a range of emotions in order to elicit stronger responses from mothers. The design

of the current study also provided a unique opportunity to investigate another hypothetical

approach-negative emotion that has yet to be examined in the frontal EEG alpha asymmetry

literature as it pertains to parents: empathetic concern. When mothers view videos of their

infants in distress, it is possible that the discomfort they experience is associated with

approach motivation. In fact, Dix’s (1991) model of the affective organization of parenting

would suggest that parental experience of negative emotion, accompanied by child-oriented

concerns, would motivate the parent to take action.

30

The work of Harmon-Jones and colleagues not only aids our understanding of the

motivational tendencies associated with frontal EEG alpha asymmetry, but also underscores

the utility of examining EEG activation in addition to activity. That is to say that an

individual’s pattern of motivational and emotional responding during emotional events may

provide important added information beyond motivational and emotional traits measured at

rest. Studies supporting the motivational direction model have largely targeted frontal EEG

activity at rest, measuring individuals’ propensities to consistently respond with approach- or

withdrawal-related motivation across a range of situations (Davidson, 1998). Alternatively,

individuals’ responses may also be situation-specific such that most individuals would be

expected to respond in a similar way to a given environmental stimulus (e.g. a fear situation).

Lastly, it is possible that individual predispositions might interact with situation-specific

factors to produce behavioral outcomes. Although investigations of individual differences in

affective style have aided our understanding of the neural correlates of personality traits,

psychopathology, and state-related emotional changes, examination of individual differences

in affective capabilities, as indexed by an individual’s capacity to respond given situation

demands, can enhance our understanding of online emotional/motivational responding and

parenting as a process (Coan, Allen, & McKnight, 2006).

Coan, Allen and McKnight’s (2006) capability model of frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry and emotion-related constructs examines an individual’s capacity for approach or

withdrawal given the situational demands. Individual differences in frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry should be thought of as an interaction between individuals’ emotion-regulation

abilities and the emotional demands of the situation. The model hypothesizes that individual

differences in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry will be more pronounced during emotion-

31

elicitation procedures than during baseline, based on evidence that individuals engage in a

range of uncontrolled mental activity during baseline or rest procedures (e.g. Binder et al.,

1999). Furthermore, the model hypothesizes that individual differences in frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry measured during emotion-elicitation procedures will demonstrate stronger

relations with emotion-related constructs than individual differences in frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry measured at rest. This hypothesis was based on evidence that frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry during emotion tasks appears to predict traits and behaviors that frontal EEG

asymmetry at rest does not (e.g. Harmon-Jones, et al., 2002). Coan, Allen and McKnight

(2006) collected frontal EEG alpha asymmetry data from participants during a baseline

period and across 5 emotion-elicitation conditions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, and sadness).

Preliminary findings support the hypotheses of the capability model. For instance, frontal

EEG alpha asymmetry during an induced fear condition was related to self-reported negative

affect, whereas frontal EEG alpha asymmetry at rest was not. Interestingly, stable individual

differences (EEG at rest) and condition type accounted for 26% and 5% of the variance in

overall asymmetry scores across conditions, respectively. The interaction between stable

individual differences and condition, however, accounted for 50% of the variance. This

evidence supports the notion that stable individual differences in frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry represent differential capacities for responding that depend on the situational

demands.

The capability model is particularly suited for investigations of parenting as a

process. Parenting competence is not defined as the possession of a set of adaptive parenting

skills per se, but rather having the capacity to utilize these skills in the moment, given the

demands of the parent-child interaction. As an example, Cole and colleagues (Cole, Woolger,

32

Power, & Smith, 1992) found that although father-daughter incest survivors did not differ

from non-risk mothers in their attitudes about warmth and discipline in parenting, they did

report lower confidence, a reduced sense of efficacy, and inconsistency in their parenting.

Mothers in the risk group possessed knowledge of adaptive parenting skills, but were unable

to utilize them during emotionally challenging interactions with their child. The capability

model offers another heuristic to examine individual differences in emotional/motivational

responding in the moment, and suggests that frontal EEG alpha asymmetry values would not

necessarily generalize from one environmental situation (e.g. play interactions with a happy

child) to another (e.g. discipline interactions with a noncompliant child). Given the range of

the emotional demands on parents (e.g. handling child transgressions, engaging the child in

joyful play, soothing a distressed child) the capability model offers an exciting framework for

the study of conditions that place parenting at risk.

Neural Correlates of Parenting

The vast body of empirical evidence documenting parents’ role in healthy child

developmental trajectories spans multiple disciplines, levels of analysis, and methodologies.

Therefore, it is not surprising that in the “Decade of the Brain,” emerging neuroscience

technologies were increasingly employed to investigate parental responsiveness to infant

cues. Information derived at this level of analysis further aids our understanding of

underlying risk and protective factors in parenting processes and the quality of the parent-

child emotional relationship. The human research in this domain has been an extension of

findings from animal studies that implicated specific neuroanatomical structures in maternal

behavior (see Numan, 1994). Given the high spatial resolution of functional magnetic

resonance imaging (fMRI), it follows that most of the human research to date has utilized this

33

technique to investigate neuroanatomical structures involved in maternal behavior (i.e.

Bartels & Zeki, 2004; Britton et al., 2006; Leibenluft, Gobbini, Harrison, & Haxby, 2004;

Lorberbaum et al., 1999; Ranote et al., 2004; Strathearn, Li, Fonagy & Montague, 2008). No

studies to date, however, have utilized electroencephalography (EEG) technology within the

parenting context. Examination of EEG activity, specifically regarding emotional and

motivational responding within the context of intimate relationships, is a glaring omission in

the field. Unique information obtained from studies of EEG activity can further explicate the

neural correlates of parenting behavior. Furthermore, understanding which infant stimuli can

elicit meaningful responses from parents is extremely important if we hope to identify

conditions of parenting risk and resilience. Infant photos and infant cries have been the most

commonly used stimuli in studies examining the neural correlates of maternal responsiveness

(Bartels & Zeki, 2004; Green & Gustafson, 1983; Leibenluft et al., 2004; Lorberbaum et al.,

2002; Strathearn, et al., 2008). The current study used video clips of mothers’ own infants

displaying various emotional expressions, and contends that these videos are more

ecologically valid in the study of emotional and motivational responding within the parenting

context than still photographs or sound clips. Furthermore, the inclusion of positive, negative,

and neutral emotional expressions from mothers’ own infants permitted the examination of

how mothers differentially respond to a range of affective infant cues. No study has used

these unique stimuli in an attempt to understand maternal responsiveness from an EEG

perspective.

Despite recent fMRI investigations of maternal responsiveness to infant cues, the

neural underpinnings of parenting behavior are still largely unknown. The existing body of

work, however, highlights differences in the processing of infant stimuli compared to less

34

personally relevant emotional stimuli. For instance, Lorberbaum et al. (2002) found that

several brain regions in first-time mothers responded uniquely or more intensely to an

unknown infant’s crying (an innate elicitor of maternal caregiving) than to a white-noise

control. Although this study did not utilize mothers’ own infants, studies have demonstrated

that a majority of parents can distinguish their own infants’ cries from an unknown infants’

cries, based solely on acoustic cues within the cry (Green & Gustafson, 1983). Infant cries

appear to evoke a unique response in mothers, and mothers may be even more attuned to

cues from their own infants. Feelings of maternal love have been found to produce brain

activation in areas similar to Lorberbaum et al.’s (2002) infant cry study (i.e. Bartels & Zeki,

2004). As mothers viewed pictures of their own and unfamiliar children, there was particular

activation of brain structures of the reward and salience detection systems. These structures

are also known to have dense oxytocin and vasopressin receptors – hormones associated with

pair-bonding and attachment (Insel, 1997, 2003; Young, Murphy Young, & Hammock, 2005;

Young & Wang, 2004). Additionally, there was enhanced activation in areas related to pain

suppression and decreased activation in social judgment networks and negative emotion

centers. In a similar fMRI study, Strathearn et al. (2008) used pictures of own- and

unfamiliar-infants displaying happy, sad, or neutral facial expressions. Congruent with

previous studies, greater medial prefrontal activation was seen with own vs. unfamiliar

infants. However, mothers also demonstrated differential responding based on the valence of

own-infant emotional expressions such that dopaminergic reward-related brain regions were

activated during happy, but not sad infant photos. Thus, sensory stimuli from one’s own child

may uniquely tap emotion/motivation processes in the brain that other emotional stimuli may

not, and the valence of infant emotion may be of particular importance. The current study

35

examined frontal EEG alpha asymmetry as an index of affective-motivational responding as

an extension of the findings from these fMRI studies, with the aim of better understanding

online emotions in parenting.

In further support of the unique maternal emotional response to one’s own infants,

Nitschke et al. (2004) found greater orbitofrontal cortex activation in mothers when they

were viewing photos of their own infant compared to an unfamiliar infant, and this activation

was positively correlated with their self-report of positive affect while viewing the photos.

The positive affect experienced by mothers with their infants might best be characterized as

“post goal attainment positive affect” (Davidson, Pizzagalli, Nitschke, & Kalin, 2003). A

sense of appreciation, fulfillment, and enjoyment underlies this type of positive affect,

differentiating it from positive affect in response to less personally relevant stimuli. Post goal

attainment positive affect may be akin to Dix’s (1991) model of the affective organization of

parenting in which he contends that parental positive affect arises when events facilitate

parents’ child-oriented concerns. In fact, mothers in Nitschke et al.’s (2004) study did not

show habituation in their positive emotional response to images of their own infant, but did

with other pleasant stimuli. However, it is important to note that this study did not examine

maternal response to negative infant cues. In one of the few studies to use both positive and

negative child stimuli, Seifritz et al. (2003) found that non-parents showed stronger

activation to an unfamiliar infant’s laughing than parents, and parents showed stronger

activation to an unfamiliar infant’s crying than non-parents, particularly in regions associated

with attentional control of cognitive and emotional processes. Parenting experience may lead

one to selectively attend to the infant cries over laughter because of its biological relevance

and signal for approach/action from the parent. The current study used both positive and

36

negative visual infant stimuli from mothers’ own infants to better understand maternal

responsiveness to a range of infant cues and to elucidate those cues that are the most

meaningful to parents.

A relevant body of work by Swain and colleagues (see Swain, Lorberbaum, Kose &

Strathearn, 2007 for a review) has been accumulating in recent years regarding human parent

brain responses to infant cries and pictures. In one such example, Swain et al. (2004) have

demonstrated a change in response over the initial postpartum period, as well as differences

between mothers and fathers. Primiparous mothers demonstrated more activity in amygdala

and basal ganglia in response to their infant’s cries within 2-4 weeks postpartum, as well as

greater reported preoccupation with infant well-being in this period. In contrast, fathers

reported less preoccupation and demonstrated a corresponding lack of activation in amygdala

and basal ganglia. However, when mothers viewed the same stimuli again in the 3-4 month

postpartum period, mothers showed no amygdala activation, but rather activation in medial

prefrontal cortical and hypothalamic (hormone control) regions. Such findings suggest a

change in regional brain responses to ones own infant with the development of the parent-

infant relationship over time that it is characterized by less anxiety and greater association of

infant signals with social behaviors and routines. In the current study, mothers were shown

videos of their 6-8 month old infants. Findings from Swain et al (2004) suggest that results of

the current study can be interpreted within the context of longer parent-infant relationship

development.

In sum, converging evidence is emerging that emotional processing within the parent-

child context may be reflected in the brain differently than emotional processing in less

personally relevant emotional contexts. Furthermore, studies have typically employed fMRI

37

methodology to identify specific neuroanatomical regions of activation, and very few studies

have examined positive, negative, and neutral video stimuli of mothers’ own infants in order

to differentiate parental responses to a range of infant emotional cues. Frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry is a particularly promising area of study that can further our understanding of the

neural correlates of emotional responding within the parenting context.

The Current Study

Parenting is an inherently emotional experience, yet little is known about the

emotions that parents experience “online” during interactions with their children.

Furthermore, such emotional experiences may facilitate or undermine competent parenting,

and empirical investigations of parenting emotion can aid our understanding of those

conditions that place parenting at risk. Much of the research on parenting emotion to date

utilizes observational and self-report measurements. Often times these measurements are

only weakly correlated, if at all, suggesting that they may tap different parenting processes.

Furthermore, adults have the ability to mask or alter their social behaviors and reports.

Empirical investigation of parenting emotion typically focuses on expressed emotion rather

than experienced emotion. Such evidence suggests that positive expressed emotions are

consistent with a variety of positive outcomes in children such as peer competency,

decreased externalizing difficulties, and increased emotional understanding. Conversely,

negative expressed emotions are consistent with negative outcomes in children such as

deficits in peer play, increased externalizing difficulties, and increased child anger displays.

Indirect pathways of influence have also been examined, particularly in relation to maternal

depression - a disorder of emotion and emotion regulation. Maternal depression can serve to

undermine competent parenting in that depressed mothers are more inattentive, unresponsive,

38

and less sensitive in caregiving than non-depressed mothers. Additionally, they often fail to

provide an adequately structured environment for the child and there is an absence of

pleasure and positive affect within the mother-child relationship. Given this risk to parenting

competency, further investigation of the nature of depression is critical in promoting healthy

child development. In the study of parenting and emotion, it is important to remember that

emotion within the parent-child dyad is transactional in nature and children’s emotional

expressions can be potent elicitors of parental emotion.

Understanding parents’ “online” emotional experiences can aid our understanding of

the conditions that place parenting at risk. The field of affective neuroscience offers exciting

tools for the exploration of in-the-moment parental experiences in response to affective

information from their own children. Frontal EEG alpha asymmetry has been consistently

linked to affective-motivational tendencies in humans. Left frontal activity is associated with

approach emotions (e.g. happiness, anger), and right frontal activity is associated with

withdrawal emotions (e.g. sadness, disgust). Additionally, depressive symptoms have

consistently been linked to right frontal EEG activity. Given this important link and our

understanding of the ways in which maternal depression may undermine competent

parenting, the necessary next steps involve the investigation of frontal EEG alpha asymmetry

and depressive symptoms, within a parenting context. Lastly, “affective style” (EEG

measured at rest) appears to represent an individual’s predisposition to respond with an

approach or withdrawal orientation across various environmental situations. However, such

individual differences in affective style likely interact with the emotional demands of a given

situation. Together, affective style and online emotional/motivational responding reflect an

individual’s capacity for emotional responding, given the demands of an emotional situation.

39

Such a dynamic approach in the study of frontal EEG activity is well suited for investigations

of parenting as a process in that parents face a wide range of emotionally challenging tasks in

interactions with their children. This approach holds promise for the expansion our

conceptualization of frontal EEG alpha asymmetry, and its extension into the domain of

intimate relationships.

The current study aimed to address the following, interrelated questions to further

understand the nature of parents’ emotional and motivational responding to their infants. If

we are to understand the conditions that place parenting at risk, we must investigate how

mothers’ affective style and online responding to their own infants relate to mothers’

subjective emotional experiences, depressive and anxious symptoms, and emotional

availability in interactions with their infants.

1) What is the association between mothers’ frontal EEG asymmetry and mothers’

emotional experience in response to their infants’ emotional displays?

a) What is the relation between mothers’ frontal EEG activity (measured at rest; a

trait measure) and mothers’ self-reported emotional experience in response to

their infants’ emotional displays? Affective style (i.e. EEG activity as a trait

measure, assessed during a baseline condition; Davidson, 1998) appears to be a

reliable predictor of state-dependent emotional responses (i.e. an individual’s

subjective emotional experience in response to an emotional situation). Adults with

greater left frontal EEG activity at rest respond to positive emotion situations with

greater self-reported positive emotion than adults with greater right frontal EEG

activity at rest. Congruently, adults with greater right frontal EEG activity at rest

respond to negative emotion situations with greater self-reported negative emotion

40

than adults with greater left frontal EEG activity at rest (e.g. Tomarken et al., 1990;

Wheeler et al., 1993). Thus, affective style appears to tap a propensity to respond

emotionally given an emotional situation. The current study aimed to extend such

findings into the domain of emotional responding within intimate relationships,

namely the mother-infant relationship. Mothers’ trait frontal EEG asymmetry was

examined in relation to mothers’ subjective emotional experiences after viewing

affective video clips of their own infants. Furthermore, the current study provided a

unique opportunity to investigate an approach-negative emotion that has yet to be

examined in the frontal EEG asymmetry literature: parental empathetic concern.

Hypothesis 1.a.i: Positive asymmetry values reflect greater left frontal EEG activity

and negative asymmetry values reflect greater right frontal EEG activity. Thus, a

positive relation was expected between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry at rest and

mothers’ self report of positive emotion (joy) in response to the infant joy and infant

neutral conditions. As mothers’ asymmetry scores reflect greater right frontal EEG

activity, they will report fewer and a lower intensity of positive emotions after seeing

their infant in a joyous or neutral state.

Hypothesis 1.a.ii: A negative relation was expected between frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry at rest and mothers’ self report of negative emotion (sadness and

anxiety/fear) in response to the infant anger/distress condition. As mothers’

asymmetry scores reflect greater right frontal EEG activity, they will report more and

a greater intensity of negative emotion after seeing their infant in an angry/distressed

state.

41

Hypothesis 1.a.iii: A positive relation was expected between frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry at rest and mothers’ self report of concern/worry in response to the infant

anger/distress condition. As mothers’ asymmetry scores reflect greater right frontal

EEG activity, they will report less concern/worry, conceptualized as an empathetic,

approach-oriented concern for ones infant. Less clear were predictions regarding the

relations between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry at rest and mothers’ self-report of

guilt in response to the infant anger/distress condition. Feelings of guilt might be

associated with a withdrawal tendency and thus it would be expected to be associated

with greater right frontal EEG activity at rest. However, guilt might also be associated

with an approach motivation and thus it would be expected to be associated with

greater left frontal EEG activity at rest. In fact, findings from Dix et al. (2004)

suggest that maternal guilt is associated with child-oriented concerns. One might

expect that mothers’ child-oriented concerns involve an approach motivation.

b) What is the relation between mothers’ frontal EEG activation (measured as

mothers view video of their infants’ emotional displays; a state measure) and

mothers’ self-reported emotional experience in response to their infants’

emotional displays? Studies involving the examination of frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry as a state rather than trait measure have demonstrated that changes in

frontal EEG alpha asymmetry can be reliably elicited through a range of emotional

paradigms. Whereas investigations of trait frontal EEG alpha asymmetry examine an

individual’s predisposition to respond in an expected way regardless of the situation,

investigations of state frontal EEG alpha asymmetry examine patterns of response

that are specific to a situation. Empirical evidence supports the proposition that

42

environmental situations that evoke approach tendencies are associated with increases

in left frontal EEG activation, and environmental situations that evoke withdrawal

tendencies are associated with increases in right frontal EEG activation (e.g. Coan,

Allen, & Harmon-Jones, 2001; Ekman & Davidson, 1993; Harmon-Jones, Sigelman,

Bohlig, & Harmon-Jones, 2003). The current study extended these findings into the

domain of intimate relations by examining mothers’ frontal EEG activation in

response to emotional video clips of their own infants. In fact, Dix (1991) places the

activation of emotion at the center of understanding parenting as a process.

Hypothesis 1.b.i: A pattern of left frontal EEG activation was expected to emerge

during the infant joy condition, and a pattern of right frontal EEG activation was

expected to emerge during the infant anger/distress condition.

Hypothesis 1.b.ii: Positive asymmetry scores reflect greater left frontal EEG

activation and negative asymmetry scores reflect greater right frontal EEG activation.

Thus, a positive relation was expected between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during

the infant joy and neutral conditions and mothers’ self report of positive emotions

(joy) in response to infant joy and infant neutral expressions. As mothers’ asymmetry

scores reflect greater right frontal EEG activation, they will report fewer and a lower

intensity of positive emotions after seeing their infant in a joyous or neutral state.

Hypothesis 1.b.iii: A negative relation was expected between frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry during the infant anger/distress condition and mothers’ self report of

negative emotions (sadness and anxiety/fear) in response to infant anger/distress. As

mothers’ asymmetry scores reflect greater right frontal EEG activation, they will

43

report more and a greater intensity of negative emotions after seeing their infant in an

angry/distressed state.

Hypothesis 1.b.iv: A positive relation was expected between frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry during the infant anger/distress condition and mothers’ self report of

concern/worry in response to infant anger/distress. As mothers’ asymmetry scores

reflect greater right frontal EEG activity, they were expected to report less

concern/worry, conceptualized as an empathetic, approach-oriented concern for ones

infant. Less clear were predictions regarding the relations between frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry during the infant anger/distress condition and mothers’ self-report of guilt

in response to infant anger/distress. Feelings of guilt might be associated with a

withdrawal motivation when mothers see their child in distress and thus it would be

expected to be associated with greater right frontal EEG activation. However, guilt

might also be associated with an approach motivation and thus it would be expected

to be associated with greater left frontal EEG activation when mothers see their child

in distress. In fact, findings from Dix et al. (2004) suggest that maternal guilt is

associated with child-oriented concerns. One might expect that mothers’ child-

oriented concerns involve approach motivation.

c) Which is a better predictor of mothers’ self-reported emotional experience in

response to their infants’ emotional displays: EEG alpha asymmetry as a trait or

state measure? Coan, Allen, and McKnight’s (2006) capability model of frontal

EEG alpha asymmetry and emotion-related constructs examines an individual’s

capacity for approach or withdrawal, given the situational demands. Such an

approach is particularly suited for investigations of parenting as a process. For

44

example, parenting competency is not the possession of a set of adaptive parenting

skills per se, but rather having the capacity to utilize those skills in the moment, given

the demands of the parent-child interaction. Preliminary investigations of the

capability model suggest that individual differences in frontal EEG asymmetry

measured during emotion-elicitation procedures produced stronger relations with

emotion-related constructs than individual differences in asymmetry measured at rest.

Hypothesis 1.c: Frontal EEG asymmetry measured during the infant joy, neutral, and

anger/distress conditions was expected to be a stronger predictor of mothers’ self-

reported emotional responses to the video clips than frontal EEG asymmetry

measured at rest.

d) Does mothers’ frontal EEG activation (state) moderate the relation between

frontal EEG activity (trait) and mothers’ self-reported emotional experience in

response to their infants’ emotional displays? In further exploration of the

capability model, Coan, Allen, and McKnight (2006) found that the interaction

between stable individual differences in EEG activity (baseline) and EEG activation

during specific emotion stimulus conditions, accounted for a much greater proportion

of the variance in EEG asymmetry across the entire study than either individual

differences or condition type alone (Coan, Allen, & McKnight, 2006). The current

study initially aimed to examine how stable individual differences in EEG activity

(baseline) and state-dependent EEG activation (while mothers’ view video clips of

their infants’ emotional displays) interacted to better predict mothers’ self-reported

emotional experience in response to these videos. However, the lack of significant

associations between frontal EEG activity during baseline and frontal EEG activation

45

during infant emotion videos with mothers’ self-reported emotional experience, as

well as small sample size, did not permit the investigation of the hypothesis that:

Hypothesis 1.d: Frontal EEG activation (state) was expected to moderate the relation

between frontal EEG activity (trait) and mothers’ self-reported emotional experience

in response to infant emotional video clips.

2) What is the association between frontal EEG asymmetry and maternal depressive and

anxious symptomatology?

a) What is the relation between mothers’ frontal EEG activity (measured at rest; a

trait measure) and the severity of self-reported past and current depressive

symptomatology, and current anxious symptomatology? Given Davidson’s (1998)

theory that trait frontal EEG asymmetry may serve as a diathesis for the development

of affective disorders, a substantial body of literature has examined the association

between trait frontal EEG asymmetry (EEG asymmetry at rest) and symptoms of

depression and anxiety. Investigations of adults with depressive symptoms, clinically

depressed adults, and infants of depressed mothers all support the proposition that

greater right frontal activation/lesser left frontal activation is associated with

depressive symptoms (see Thibodeau, Jorgensen, & Kim, 2006). Even previously

depressed individuals who are not currently depressed show decreased left frontal

activation in comparison to never-depressed individuals (Gotlib, Ranganath, &

Rosenfeld, 1998). Furthermore, right frontal activity during a baseline condition was

associated with higher anxious arousal, whereas left frontal activity was associated

with higher anxious apprehension (i.e. rumination; Mathersul, Williams, Hopkinson,

& Kemp, 2008). Anxious symptoms in the current study were assessed with the SCL-

46

90-R, which addresses symptoms more similar in nature to anxious arousal (i.e.

shakiness, trembling, heart pounding) than anxious apprehension. The current study

extended the present state of the literature on the association between internalizing

symptoms (i.e. depression and anxiety) and frontal EEG asymmetry by examining

such patterns within the domain of intimate relationships by using the ecologically

valid stimuli of mothers’ own infants displaying positive and negative emotions.

Hypothesis 2.a: Positive asymmetry scores reflect greater left frontal EEG activity

and negative asymmetry scores reflect greater right frontal EEG activity. Thus, a

negative relation was expected between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry at rest and

severity of past and current depressive symptoms and anxiety. As mothers’

asymmetry scores reflect greater right frontal EEG activity at rest, they will report

more severe depressive and anxious symptomatology.

b) What is the relation between mothers’ frontal EEG activation (measured as

mothers view video of their infants’ emotional displays; a state measure) and the

severity of self-reported past and current depressive symptomatology and

current anxious symptomatology. Much of the empirical investigations of frontal

EEG alpha asymmetry and depressive and anxious symptoms have focused on trait

measures of EEG asymmetry (assessed during a baseline condition). The current

study extended these findings by examining the link between state-dependent EEG

asymmetry and depressive and anxious symptomatology in mothers, specifically

within a parenting context.

Hypothesis 2.b: Positive asymmetry scores reflect greater left frontal EEG activation

and negative asymmetry scores reflect greater right frontal EEG activation. Thus, a

47

negative relation was expected between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during the

infant joy, neutral, and anger/distress conditions and mothers’ self report of past and

current depressive symptoms and current anxious symptoms. As mothers’ asymmetry

values reflect greater right frontal EEG activation during infant emotional

expressions, mothers will report more severe depressive and anxious symptomatology

c) Which is a better predictor of mothers’ self report of past and current

depressive symptoms and current anxious symptoms: EEG alpha asymmetry as

a trait or state measure? As mentioned above, the capability model (Coan, Allen,

& McKnight, 2006) suggests that individual differences in frontal EEG asymmetry

measured during emotion-elicitation procedures would produce stronger relations

with emotion-related constructs than individual differences in asymmetry measured at

rest.

Hypothesis 2.c: Frontal EEG alpha asymmetry measured during infant joy, neutral

and anger/distress conditions was expected to be a stronger predictor of mothers’ self

reported past and current depressive symptoms and current anxious symptoms than

frontal EEG alpha asymmetry measured at rest.

d) Does mothers’ frontal EEG activation (state) moderate the relation between

frontal EEG activity (trait) and the severity of mothers’ self-reported past and

current depressive symptomatology and current anxious symptomatology? In a

further test of the capability model discussed above (Coan, Allen, & McKnight, 2006)

and an extension of the research on frontal EEG alpha asymmetry at rest and

internalizing symptoms, the current study initially aimed to examine how stable

individual differences in EEG activity (baseline) and state-dependent EEG activation

48

(while mothers’ view video clips of their infants’ emotional displays) interacted to

better predict mothers’ current and past depressive symptoms and current anxious

symptoms. However, the lack of significant associations between frontal EEG activity

during infant emotion videos with mothers’ internalizing symptoms, as well as small

sample size, did not permit the investigation of the hypothesis that:

Hypothesis 2.d.: Frontal EEG activation (state) was expected to moderate the relation

between frontal EEG activity (trait) and mothers’ self-reported current and past

depressive symptoms and current anxious symptoms.

3) What is the association between frontal EEG asymmetry and the emotional quality of

mothers’ parenting? As no studies to date have explicitly linked frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry and observations of adult emotional behavior within a parenting context,

hypotheses regarding these associations were tentative, and largely grounded within the

literature on maternal depression and its relation to parenting behavior.

a) What is the relation between mothers’ frontal EEG activity (measured at rest; a

trait measure) and observed maternal emotional availability? As previously

discussed, research has repeatedly documented a link between right frontal EEG

activity, withdrawal-oriented motivation/emotion, and depressive symptoms.

Furthermore, depression has been shown to undermine competent parenting in that

depressed mothers are more inattentive, unresponsive, and less sensitive in caregiving

than non-depressed mothers. They often fail to provide an adequately structured

environment for the child, and there is an absence of pleasure and positive affect

within the mother-child relationship (Gelfand & Teti, 1990). Lastly, Dix (1991) has

suggested than an excess of emotion, even positive emotion, may lead to maladaptive

49

parenting behavior when not properly matched to a given parenting situation. Thus,

frontal EEG alpha asymmetry has been implicated in maternal depression, and

maternal depression has been implicated in parenting sensitivity, structuring,

intrusiveness and hostility. The current study aimed to close the loop by examining

the relation between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry and parenting competence.

Hypothesis 3.a.i: Positive asymmetry scores reflect greater left frontal EEG activity

and negative asymmetry scores reflect greater right frontal EEG activity. Thus, a

positive relation was expected between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry at rest and

mothers’ sensitivity and structuring with their children during observed mother-infant

free play. As mothers’ asymmetry scores at rest reflect greater right frontal EEG

activity, mothers will demonstrate less sensitivity and less structuring with their

children. Additionally, it is expected that infants of mothers with greater right frontal

EEG asymmetry at rest will demonstrate less responsiveness and involvement with

their mothers.

Hypothesis 3.a.ii: Less clear was the expected relation between frontal EEG activity

at rest and mothers’ intrusiveness and hostility. Both may be conceptualized as

negative-approach qualities and thus, according to the motivational direction model

of frontal EEG asymmetry, one might expect a positive relation between frontal EEG

asymmetry at rest and mothers’ intrusiveness and hostility with their children.

b) What is the relation between mothers’ frontal EEG activation (measured during

mothers’ viewing of their infant’s emotional displays; a state measure) and

observed maternal emotional availability? Although depression is associated with

right frontal EEG activation (withdrawal), depressed mothers can also be intrusive

50

and hostile toward their infants (Cohn et al., 1986). Such behaviors may be

characterized as approach-oriented, and thus the motivational direction model of

frontal EEG asymmetry would purport that such behaviors would be associated with

left frontal EEG activation. The unique design of the current study allowed us to go

beyond affective style alone in the investigation of maternal depression and attempt to

understand how responses in-the-moment may further explicate the neural correlates

of maternal depression and parenting at risk. Differential responding to infant

emotional cues may help explain why some depressed mothers are intrusive, whereas

others are more withdrawn, even though both subtypes might exhibit right frontal

EEG activity at rest.

Hypothesis 3.b.i: Positive asymmetry scores reflect greater left frontal EEG activation

and negative asymmetry scores reflect greater right frontal EEG activation. Thus, a

positive relation was expected between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during all

infant emotion conditions and mothers’ sensitivity and structuring with their children

during observed mother-infant free play. As mothers’ asymmetry scores reflect

greater right frontal EEG activation during infant joy, neutral, and anger/distress

expressions, mothers will demonstrate less sensitivity and less structuring with their

children.

Hypothesis 3.b.ii: It is also possible that a negative relation exists between frontal

EEG alpha asymmetry during the infant anger/distress condition and non-

intrusiveness and non-hostility. As mothers’ asymmetry scores reflect greater right

frontal EEG activation during infant anger/distress conditions, mothers may be more

non-intrusive (less intrusive) and more non-hostile (less hostile) with their children.

51

Hypothesis 3.b.iii: Less clear was the expected relation between frontal EEG

activation during the infant joy and neutral conditions and mothers’ intrusiveness and

hostility. Although these can be conceptualized as negative-approach qualities and

thus reflected in left frontal EEG activation according to the motivational direction

model of frontal EEG asymmetry, it is possible that left frontal EEG activation under

joy conditions is unrelated to these negative-approach parenting qualities, or is

negatively related. Or, it may be that a combined pattern of responding across

positive and negative infant cues is the key to understanding emotional unavailability.

Perhaps a mother who shows greater right frontal EEG activation (approach) during

both positive and negative infant emotional states would display les sensitivity in

parenting. However, a mother with greater right frontal EEG activation during

positive infant emotional states, but greater left frontal EEG activation during

negative infant emotional states might display greater intrusiveness and hostility in

parenting.

c) Which is a better predictor of observed maternal emotional availability: EEG

alpha asymmetry as a trait or state measure?

Hypothesis 3.c: Frontal EEG asymmetry measured during the infant joy, neutral, and

anger/distress conditions was expected to be a stronger predictor of observed

maternal emotional availability than frontal EEG asymmetry measured at rest.

d) Does mothers’ frontal EEG activation (state) moderate the relation between

frontal EEG activity (trait) and observed maternal emotional availability? In a

further test of the capability model discussed above (Coan, Allen, & McKnight, 2006)

and an extension of the question answered above, the current study initially aimed to

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examine how stable individual differences in EEG activity (baseline) and state-

dependent EEG activation (while mothers’ view video clips of their infants’

emotional displays) interacted to better predict mothers’ observed emotional

availability. However, the lack of significant associations between frontal EEG

activity during baseline and during infant emotion videos with mothers’ observed

emotional availability, as well as small sample size, did not permit the investigation

of the hypothesis that:

Hypothesis 3.d.: Frontal EEG activation (state) was expected to moderate the relation

between frontal EEG activity (trait) and emotional availability.

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CHAPTER II

METHOD

Participants

The current study utilized data from the Minds of Mothers Study (MOMS), funded by

The Pennsylvania State University Child Youth and Family Consortium. The larger MOM

study aimed to use the tools of affective neuroscience to further our understanding of

mothers’ emotional responses and emotion regulation capacities in the face of child-created

emotional events. All families were recruited through newspaper advertisements and the

Penn State Child Study Center’s FIRSt Families database – a database of families interested

in volunteering for research studies that are from the central Pennsylvania region.

Forty-seven mothers and their infants participated in the larger project. Due to

equipment malfunctions, 20 mothers did not have analyzable EEG data. Therefore, the

analyses of the current study included 27 mothers and their infants (see Table 1 for a

summary of participant demographic information), including 14 female and 13 male infants.

Infants were 6.94 months old on average (SD = .81) at the time of the first home visit,

ranging from 5.6 – 8.7 months old. Twelve infants were first-born, 12 were second-born, and

3 were third-born. Mothers were 30.67 years old on average (SD = 5.07) at the time of the

first home visit, ranging from 22 – 45 years old. All participants had at least a high school

degree. Thirty-seven percent of mothers also had a Bachelor’s degree, and 44% held

advanced degrees. Sixty-seven percent of mothers described themselves as unemployed or

stay-at-home-moms, and 67% of those who were working were full-time. All participants

were living with a partner, and 93% percent of mothers were married at the time of

recruitment. The average household annual income was $78,308 (SD = $58,794) and ranged

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from $12,000 to $300,000. Of the participants in the present study, 85% are Caucasian, 7%

are African American, 4% are Hispanic/Latino, and 4% did not provide information

regarding race.

Procedure

The current study was divided into three phases. Phase I involved a home visit in

which infant emotional expressions were videotaped in order to create the infant emotion

stimuli for use during mothers’ laboratory visit in Phase III. Additionally, mothers were

administered a questionnaire battery assessing demographic characteristics, psychiatric

symptoms, parenting cognitions, and the quality of the mother-infant relationship. Phase II

involved a second home visit in which mother-infant free play interactions were videotaped

for later coding of mothers’ emotional availability. Phase III involved mothers’ visit to the

Human Electrophysiology Facility (HEF) at Penn State to participate in an EEG recording

protocol utilizing the pre-recorded video segments of infant emotional expressions from

Phase I. Additionally, mothers reported their emotional experiences in response to the infant

emotion stimuli and their perceptions of the type and intensity of their infants’ emotions in

the video, after the EEG recordings were complete. Standard procedures for acquiring

informed consent were used, and tasks were briefly described to mothers prior to the start of

each visit.

Phase Ia – Elicitation of Infant Emotion. At the time of the first home visit, infants

were placed securely in an infant seat situated on the floor in a quiet room in the mothers’

homes. Mothers were within auditory but not visual proximity of their infant during these

procedures. The camera was perched behind the Research Assistant (RA) on a tripod,

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focused solely on the infant and continuously recording infant facial activity. The RA was

situated within 2 feet of the infant.

Finger/Block Tracking. Infant neutral expressions were obtained by having

infants visually track the RA’s moving finger or an orange block in the RA’s hand in order to

elicit interest without positive or negative facial expressions.

Peek-a-Boo & Social Smile. Infant expressions of joy were obtained by having

the RA smile and quietly vocalize to the infant, and/or play a game of peek-a-boo. Given the

ubiquity of infant social smiling by 6 months of age in response to the social smiles of and

interaction with others, we expected this to be a reliable procedure in eliciting positive

emotion in infants. In the few instances when the RA was unable to elicit positive emotion

from the infant, the infant’s mother was brought into the room to elicit infant smiling using

the same procedures.

Arm Restraint. Infant displays of angry distress (anger and anger/sadness

blends) were elicited through the use of the gentle arm-restraint procedure, a well-established

procedure used in studies of emotion regulation in very young children (Stifter & Braungart,

1995; Stifter & Jain, 1996). Because very young children often exhibit anger expressions

accompanied by sadness (Camras, Sullivan, & Michel, 1993), the distress exhibited by

infants during this task is likely an anger-sadness blend. In this task, the RA sat directly

behind the infants in the infant seat, and gently held the infants’ arms down at his/her side for

2 minutes or 20 seconds of hard crying, whichever came first. The RA then released the

infants’ arms for 1 minute and remained motionless behind the infant while the video

recording continued.

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Phase Ib – Extraction of Infant Emotion Stimuli. Five unique 10-second segments of

infant expressed emotion were extracted from the continuous video recording described

above: 2 joy segments, 2 anger/distress segments, and 1 neutral segment. Two joy and two

anger/distress segments were extracted to reduce possible habituation to the emotional

stimuli. The 10-second clips were centered on the peak intensity of an expressed emotion

(i.e. peak emotional expression was around the 5-second mark of each clip).

Phase Ic – Self-Reported Depressive and Anxious Symptoms. The Symptom Rating

Checklist 90-Revised (SCL-90-R; Derogatis, Lazarus, & Maruish, 1994) depression and

anxiety subscales were used to assess the severity of mothers’ depressive symptoms.

Participants were asked to indicate how much each listed problem had bothered them during

the past 7 days. The depression subscale contained 13 items including “feeling blue,”

“feeling hopeless about the future,” and “feelings of worthlessness.” The anxiety subscale

contained 10 items including “feeling tense or keyed up,” “nervousness or shakiness inside,”

and “the feeling that something bad is going to happen to you.” Each item was rated on a 5-

point scale from 0 (not at all) to 4 (extremely). An average score for the subscale was

computed and converted to a T-score, using norms from non-patient adult females. The SCL-

90-R has strong psychometric credentials, including high internal and test-retest reliability,

factorial validity, and convergent and discriminant validity (Derogatis, Lazarus, & Maruish,

1994). Additionally, a Lifetime Depression Interview was created for the current study.

Participants were asked to describe any periods during their lifetime in which they felt

depressed or down for most of the day, for longer than 2 weeks.Trained clinical psychology

doctoral students coded the content of the interview and categorized mothers as having a

significant depression history if mothers reported 2 or more episodes of depression, with each

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episode lasting at least one month. The total number of months spent depressed in mothers’

lifetime was also used as a measure of a lifetime history of depression.

Phase II – Mother-Infant Free Play Interaction and Emotional Availability. A second

home visit was conducted within one week of the first home visit. During this visit, mothers

were videotaped while playing with their infants for 30 minutes. Mothers were free to

structure the activity in whatever way was typical for them. The RA adjusted the camera to

capture the mother and infant in profile whenever possible. The mother-infant interactions

were assessed with the Emotional Availability Scales system (EAS; Biringen, Robinson, &

Emde, 1998), a system closely aligned with attachment theory and Ainsworth’s

conceptualization of parental sensitivity (Bretherton, 2000). Two female coders, trained and

certified by the EAS developer, Zeynep Biringen, coded the interactions. Adequate inter-rater

reliability was achieved for all scales (intraclass correlations range from .668 to .738), with

the exception of Non-hostility (intraclass correlation = .411), likely due to the limited range

in scores on that subscale. The EAS has earned the reputation of being one of the most well-

conceived systems for assessing the emotional quality of parent-child interaction in the field

(Teti & Huang, 2005). Maternal emotional availability is assessed with four dimensions:

Sensitivity (a 9-point scale assessing parental warmth and emotional connectedness with the

child); Structuring (a 5-point scale assessing parents’ ability to scaffold their children’s play

and set appropriate limits); Non-intrusiveness (a 5-point reversed scale assessing parental

controlling behavior during the interaction); and Non-hostility (a 5-point reversed scale

assessing covertly- and overtly-directed hostility during the interaction). The child’s

emotional availability is assessed with two scales: Responsiveness (a 7-point scale assessing

infants’ enthusiasm and pleasure in interactions with their mothers); and Involvement (a 7-

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point scale assessing the degree to which infants attends to and directly engage their mothers

in interaction).

Phase IIIa – EEG Data. Within one week of the second home visit, mothers visited

the Human Electrophysiology Facility (HEF) at Penn State to participate in an EEG

recording protocol using the pre-recorded video segments of infant emotion obtained during

the initial home visit.

Data Acquisition. The current study used an Electrical Geodesics, Inc. (EGI)

250 Dense-Array EEG System. This system included: 3 HydroCel Geodesic Sensor Nets, a

Net Amps 250 amplifier, an Apple PowerMac G5, Net Station 4.1.2. software, a 23-inch

Apple Cinema Display, and an appropriately placed chin rest situated approximately 61

centimeters from the computer display monitor to minimize head movement. The system

utilizes a Geodesic sensor net configured for 128 channels of data, the placement of which

maps onto the traditional International 10-20 system (Klem, Luders, Jasper, & Elger, 1999).

Net application uses a non-abrasion application method. The net includes electrodes placed

on the supra- and suborbit of each eye to detect eye blink artifacts. Electrodes are also affixed

to the left and right ears to enable the computation of “linked ear” (mastoid) reference, which

can be used in addition to an averaged reference and Cz (vertex) reference in data analysis

(Hagemann, 2004). During acquisition, data were referenced to channel 129 (Cz; vertex) and

were re-referenced offline to the average reference with PARE correction (see further

description below). The system’s Net Station software enables the integration of stimulus

presentation events and external signals, detection of artifacts (i.e. eye blinks and eye

movements), detection and correction of bad channels, and re-referencing of data based on

criteria defined by the user. All electrode impedances in all EEG recordings were kept below

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50kΩ and signals were sampled at a rate of 250 samples/second. The Human

Electrophysiology Facility (HEF) is equipped with two dark-sealed testing rooms that are

configured to allow video and audio feeds among testing chambers. The EEG suite is also

equipped with an Apple iSight digital video camera to record mothers’ facial expressions

during the procedure. Additionally, a mirror was placed adjacent to mothers’ faces that

reflected the computer monitor’s image to the iSight camera.

Baseline Procedure. Following the procedure of Tomarken et al. (1992a) each

mother participated in an 8-minute baseline recording session, subdivided into eight 1-minute

trials (four with eyes open (O), four with eyes closed (C), in the following order: C, O, O, C,

O, C, C, O). Participants heard instructions to either open or close their eyes each minute. In

his review of methodological issues attendant to studies of PFC asymmetry, Hagemann

(2004) noted that an eight-minute resting period such as this is likely to yield highly reliable

baseline measurement of asymmetry. E-Prime, an experiment operating system, inserted

markers into the EEG recording, in real time, when each 1-minute trial began. These markers

were then used to segment the EEG record by trial during data analyses.

Emotion Video Presentation. Continuous EEG data were recorded while

mothers watched a 15-minute video stream of their infant’s emotion video clips. The clips

were cut together into a single video presentation, with a 15-second black screen presented

between each emotion segment. The order of the positive (P1 and P2), negative (N1 and N2)

and neutral (Ne) video clips was counterbalanced within the video stream, and each mother

viewed the emotion clips of their infants in the same order with 15-second black screens

between each clip: Ne, P1, N1, Ne, N2, P2, N1, Ne, P1, N2, P2, Ne, P1, Ne, N1, P2, N2, Ne,

Ne, P1, N1, Ne, N2, P2, N1, Ne P1, N2, P2, Ne, P1, Ne, N1, P2, N2, Ne. Therefore, mothers

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saw each unique joy clip 6 times (for a total of 12 joy clips), each unique anger/distress clip 6

times (for a total of 12 anger/distress clips), and each neutral clip 12 times. The entire infant

emotion video presentation lasted 15 minutes. A mirror placed adjacent to mothers’ heads

reflected the computer monitor’s image to the digital video camera. After completion of the

EEG recording, the video from the digital video camera was synched to the EEG record.

Markers were manually inserted into the continuous EEG record at the onset of each emotion

clip and black screen, based on the timing of each clip and the clip’s image reflected in the

mirror. These markers were later used to segment the EEG record by stimulus type during

data analyses.

Data Cleaning. After EEG data acquisition, a 1-30 Hz bandpass filter was

applied to isolate EEG activity within the 1-30 Hz range (see Ray, 1990). Artifacts were

screened and bad channels were replaced using automated Net Station 4.1.2 artifact detection

software. In bad channel replacement, data from “bad” channels (fast transits exceeding 200

µv in a 640 ms window size) were replaced with data interpolated from the remaining

channels using spherical splines. Studies have demonstrated that by utilizing spherical

splines, voltage values at a given scalp location can be accurately interpolated from other

evenly-distributed scalp locations (Luu et al., 2001; Perrin, Pernier, Bertrand, Giard, &

Gechallier, 1987). Data were re-referenced offline using an average reference with Polar

Average Reference Effect (PARE) correction. An average reference is preferable to a Cz

reference in that no single scalp location can be assumed to have a voltage value of 0, against

which all other locations can be referenced. In contrast, the dipolar nature of neural sources

suggests that the voltage at every evenly-distributed, uniformly sampled electrode on a given

surface body will sum to zero. That is to say, the positive and negative fields across the scalp

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would sum to zero. However, despite the use of high-density EEG nets, uniform sampling is

impossible as there are no electrodes located at the bottom of the head. Therefore, the

average reference would be biased toward scalp locations with a greater density of

electrodes, namely the top of the head. This polar average reference effect (PARE) must be

corrected in order to obtain a more accurate average reference that is closer to the ideal value

of 0. Average reference with PARE correction uses spline interpolation to interpolate

voltages at the bottom of the head where there are no electrodes, and uses this information to

calculate a more accurate average reference (Junghoefer, Elbert, Tucker, & Braun, 1999).

Lastly, principal components analysis (PCA) was used to remove artifacts in the continuous

EEG record. PCA decomposes complex, superimposed effects in the EEG signal into

uncorrelated constructs that are spatially orthogonal. Wallstrom, Kass, Miller, Cohn, and Fox

(2004) found that PCA effectively reduced ocular artifact in the EEG record with minimal

spectral distortion. Furthermore, they found that small epoch lengths (around 1-second as

opposed to 60-seconds) improved the accuracy of estimating spectral power in the alpha

bands. The current study used 2-second epochs, further discussed below.

Data Reduction. Each 10-second segment corresponding to the video

presentation of infant emotion was divided into 2-second epochs that overlapped by 1.5

seconds. The overlap compensates for the minimal weight accorded to the ends of each

epoch from the application of a Hamming window weighting function. A Fast Fourier

Transform (FFT) was applied to all artifact-free epochs (after PCA analyses), and all power

measures were log-transformed to avoid non-normal distribution. Average power in the 8-13

Hz band was taken as an index of alpha power. An asymmetry score was computed by taking

the difference of natural log transformed scores for all sites that have symmetrical left and

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right locations. A cluster of six electrodes surrounding the F3 (left) location of the

International 10-20 System (see Ray, 1990) (electrodes 19, 20 23, 24, 27, 28) were averaged

and subtracted from the average of a symmetrical cluster of six electrodes surrounding the F4

(right) location of the International 10-20 system (electrodes 3, 4, 117, 118, 123, 124). A

cluster of six electrodes surrounding the F7 (left) location (electrodes 26, 27, 32, 33, 34, 38)

were averaged and subtracted from the average of a symmetrical cluster of six electrodes

surrounding the F8 (right) location (electrodes 1, 2, 116, 121, 122, 123; see Figure 1). The

asymmetry score was computed such that the left log transformed score was always

subtracted from the right (i.e. ln[right]-ln[left]), with higher values on this index reflecting

relatively greater left activity (i.e. relatively greater right alpha). Asymmetry scores were

computed for the F4-F3 and F8-F7 pairings. The natural log transformation is customary in

research on EEG asymmetry as EEG power values tend to be positively skewed (Tomarken

et al., 1992a).

The unique experimental design of the current study permitted multiple approaches in

the examination of the relations between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during the three

infant emotion video conditions and maternal responsiveness (self-reported emotional

experience, self-reported depressive and anxious symptoms, and observed maternal

emotional availability in mother-infant free-play interaction). Mothers saw each 10-second

infant emotion video multiple times, and the following variables were created: average

asymmetry across all presentations of a given infant emotion video (i.e. EEG asymmetry

values across all seconds of all of the infant joy videos, averaged together); average

asymmetry of each video type separately (i.e. EEG asymmetry values across all seconds of

the infant joy 1 video averaged together, infant joy 2 video, etc...); average asymmetry for the

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first 3 presentations of an infant emotion video in order to reduce potential effects of

habituation (i.e. EEG asymmetry values across all seconds of only the first 3 presentations of

any infant joy video); average maximum asymmetry achieved for a given infant emotion

video (i.e. the one EEG asymmetry value within each infant joy video presentation that

deviated the most from 0, averaged together across all infant joy videos); and average

asymmetry of a given infant emotion by thirds (i.e. EEG asymmetry values for the first 5

seconds of all infant joy videos averaged together, the second (middle) 5 seconds, etc...), as

mothers may have had their strongest reactions at the onset of the video, or during the middle

of the video where peak infant emotion was centered. A similar pattern of results emerged for

all methodological approaches to frontal EEG alpha asymmetry scores. Therefore, only

overall averaged asymmetry values (i.e. all infant joy videos) and average asymmetry of each

video type separately (i.e. EEG asymmetry values across all seconds of the infant joy 1 video

averaged together, infant joy 2 video, etc...) are reported in the Results.

Phase IIIb - Maternal Self-Reported Emotional Experience & Perceptions of Infant

Emotions. Following the EEG recording session, mothers were presented with each of the 5

unique 10-second emotion video clips of their infant and responded to a series of questions

about the emotions she and the infant were experiencing. Videos were presented in the

following order: Neutral, Positive 1, Negative 1, Negative 2, Positive 2. Based on work by

Cole, Teti, and Zahn-Waxler (2003) mothers were presented with several discrete emotions

(joy, irritability/anger, sadness, anxiety/fear, disgust, concern/worry, embarrassment, and

guilt) after each video clip and selected all the emotions they had experienced while viewing

that video segment. For each emotion mothers endorsed, they then rated its intensity from 1

(weak intensity) to 3 (strong intensity), described why they felt the way they did, and

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indicated whether each particular stimulus made them want to approach or withdraw from

their child with the option of providing and explaining an alternate experience. Finally,

mothers selected one of 13 emotions/states that they felt typified their child’s emotional

display in the video (joy, surprise, anger/frustration, sadness, anxiety/fear, disgust,

concern/worry, fatigue, interest, excitement, hunger, boredom, or pain), with the option of

providing and explaining an alternative emotion/state. For the selected emotion/state,

mothers rated the intensity of their infants’ emotional display as compared to the infant’s

typical display of that emotion, from 1 (very little) to 9 (very much).

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CHAPTER III

RESULTS

Study Aim 1: What is the relation between mothers’ frontal EEG alpha asymmetry and

mothers’ reported emotional experience in response to their infants’ emotional displays?

1a. Frontal EEG activity (measured at rest; a trait measure) as a correlate of

mothers’ reported emotional experience in response to infant emotion videos. Correlational

analyses were conducted to examine the following hypotheses: Greater right frontal

activation (negative asymmetry scores) during the baseline condition would be associated

with (1) less mother reported joy during infant joy and neutral videos (positive relation); (2)

greater mother reported sadness and anxiety/fear during infant anger/distress videos (negative

relation); and (3) less mother reported concern/worry (conceptualized as empathetic concern)

during infant anger/distress videos (positive relation). Less clear were predictions of mothers’

experience of guilt during infant anger/distress videos. Mothers’ endorsement of emotions

(Yes/No responses) and the intensity of each experienced emotion in response to infant

emotion videos were examined. Several emotions were infrequently endorsed (see Table 2).

Those emotions endorsed by 2 or fewer participants (< 10% of the participant sample) were

excluded from analyses.

None of the hypothesized relations between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during

baseline and mothers’ reported emotional experience in response to infant emotions videos

were significant; this was true for mothers’ endorsement of discrete emotions at medial-

frontal (F4/F3) and lateral-frontal (F8/F7) sites (see Tables 4 & 5), as well as for intensity

ratings of mothers’ experienced emotions at medial-frontal and lateral-frontal sites (see

Tables 6 & 7).

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1b. Frontal EEG activation (measured as mothers view video of their infants’

emotional displays; a state measure) as a correlate of mothers’ reported emotional

experience in response to infant emotion videos. A 3 x 2 within-subjects analysis of variance

(ANOVA) was conducted with infant emotion video condition (joy vs. anger/distress vs.

neutral interest) and hemisphere site of measured EEG alpha power (lnF3 – left hemisphere

vs. lnF4 – right hemisphere) as the independent variables in order to test the hypothesis that

left frontal activation would be greater during the infant joy videos than during infant

anger/distress videos, and right frontal activation would be greater during infant

anger/distress videos than during infant joy videos. In other words, these analyses served as a

“manipulation check” that the infant emotion videos elicited maternal frontal EEG activation

in the hypothesized directions. There was no significant main effect of infant emotion video

on alpha power, F(2, 25) = 2.319, p > .05. However, there was a significant main effect of

hemisphere site such that left alpha power was significantly greater than right alpha power

across all infant emotion video conditions F(1, 26) = 7.842, p < .01. Alpha power is inversely

related to activation; thus, mothers experienced greater right frontal activation during all

video conditions, regardless of infant emotional valence. There was no significant video x

hemisphere interaction F(2, 25) = .994, p > .05. (See Table 3 for means and standard

deviations).

Correlational analyses were conducted to examine the following hypotheses: Greater

right frontal activation (negative asymmetry scores) during the infant joy and neutral video

would be associated with (1) less mother-reported joy during infant joy and neutral videos

(positive relation); (2) greater mother-reported sadness and anxiety/fear during infant

anger/distress videos (negative relation); and (3) less mother-reported concern/worry

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(conceptualized as empathetic concern) during infant anger/distress videos (positive relation).

Less clear were predictions of mothers’ experience of guilt during infant anger/distress

videos. Mothers’ endorsement of emotions (Yes/No responses) and the intensity of each

experienced emotion in response to infant emotion videos were examined. Again, those

emotions endorsed by 2 or fewer participants (< 10% of the sample) were excluded from

analyses.

There were significant negative relations between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry

during all three infant emotion videos and mothers’ endorsement of irritability/anger in

response to version 1 of the infant anger/distress video at medial-frontal sites (r’s(25) range

from -.423 to -.464, p < .05; see Table 4). Greater right frontal activation (negative

asymmetry scores) during each of the three infant emotion videos was associated with

mothers’ endorsement of irritability/anger in response to seeing the infant anger/distress

video. At lateral-frontal sites, there was a significant positive relation between frontal EEG

alpha asymmetry during the infant neutral video and mothers’ endorsement of sadness during

version 2 of the infant anger/distress videos (r(25) = .380, p < .05; see Table 5). Greater right

frontal activation (negative asymmetry scores) during infant neutral videos was associated

with mothers not endorsing sadness during version 2 of the infant anger/distress video.

Contrary to expectations, frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during infant emotion videos was

unrelated to the intensity of mothers’ emotional experiences in response to the infant emotion

videos at medial-frontal (see Table 6) and lateral-frontal (see Table 7) sites. However, there

were significant negative relations between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during all three

infant emotion videos and mother-rated intensity of the infants’ expressed emotion during the

infant joy and neutral videos at medial-frontal sites (r’s(24) range from -.423 to -.608, p <

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.05; see Table 6). Greater right frontal activation (negative asymmetry scores) during all the

three infant emotion videos was associated with greater intensity of infant expressed emotion

in the joy and neutral videos only, as rated by their mothers. Of note, mothers described their

own infant as expressing primarily joy (50.0%), interest (14.8%) or excitement (27.7%) in

the infant joy video conditions. In the infant neutral video condition, mothers described their

own infant as primarily expressing interest (59.3%) or contentment (14.8%).

1c. Which is a better predictor of mothers’ self-reported emotional experience in

response to their infants’ emotional displays: EEG alpha asymmetry as a trait or state

measure? Due to largely nonsignificant relations between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry

during baseline and mothers’ emotional experience in response to their infants’ emotional

displays, the hypothesis that frontal EEG alpha asymmetry as a state measure (recorded

during infant emotion videos) would better predict mothers’ reported emotional experience

than frontal EEG alpha asymmetry as a trait measure (recorded during baseline) was not

tested directly. An alternative measure of frontal EEG alpha asymmetry was computed,

which may be more sensitive to individual differences in the capacity to respond with

approach or withdrawal tendencies, given situational demands. Frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry during baseline was subtracted from frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during the

infant emotion videos. Thus, this computed difference score reflects a relative shift toward

greater right or left frontal activation from a previously recorded baseline period to the

infant emotion videos. A parallel approach was also investigated, in which frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry during the inter-stimulus blank screens during the infant emotion video condition

was subtracted from frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during the infant emotion videos.

Similarly, this computed difference score reflects a relative shift toward greater right or left

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frontal activation from a concurrently recorded “baseline” (i.e. the 15-second blank screens

between each 10-second emotion video presentation) to the infant emotion videos. A similar

pattern of results emerged for both approaches, with several additional significant relations

utilizing the latter measure. Therefore, results will be reported below for the difference scores

reflecting a relative shift toward greater right or left frontal activation from a concurrently

recorded “baseline” (i.e. inter-stimulus blank screens) to infant emotion videos. Correlations

for difference scores reflecting a relative shift toward greater right or left frontal activation

from a previously recorded baseline period to the infant emotion videos can be found in

Tables 8 and 9 for mothers’ yes/no emotion responses to infant emotion videos, and Tables

12 and 13 for mother-reported intensity of emotional experiences in response to infant

emotion videos.

Frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during infant emotion videos is highly correlated with

frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during the inter-stimulus blank screens (r’s(25) range from

.989 to .995, p < .001). Therefore, frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during the inter-stimulus

blank screens was related to mothers’ reported emotional experiences to infant emotion

videos at medial-frontal and lateral-frontal sites in a similar pattern as previously reported for

frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during infant emotion videos (see Tables 4-7). This strong

correlation between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during infant emotion videos and during

the inter-stimulus blank screens may mask subtle shifts in asymmetry that occur with the

onset of each infant video. Correlational analyses were conducted with the frontal EEG

asymmetry difference scores described above (frontal EEG alpha asymmetry from inter-

stimulus blank screens subtracted from frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during infant emotion

video). A shift toward greater right frontal activation at medial-frontal sites during infant

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anger/distress videos was associated with mothers not endorsing joy during both versions of

the infant anger/distress video (Version 1: r(25) = .488, p < .01; Version 2: r(25) = .468, p <

.05), and mothers’ endorsement of irritability/anger during version 1 of the infant

anger/distress video (r(25) = -.445, p < .05; see Table 10). A shift toward greater right frontal

activation at medial-frontal sites during infant neutral videos was also associated with

mothers not endorsing joy during version 1 of the infant anger/distress video (r(25) = .441, p

< .01; see Table 10). A shift toward greater right frontal activation at medial-frontal sites

during infant joy videos was significantly associated with mothers not endorsing guilt to

version 1 of the infant anger/distress video (r(25) = .396, p < .05; see Table 5). A similar

pattern of results emerged for lateral-frontal sites; see Table 11.

Regarding the intensity of mothers’ emotional experiences, a shift toward greater right

frontal activation at medial-frontal sites to infant anger/distress videos was significantly

associated with greater intensity of mother-reported sadness (r(19) = -.530, p < .05), greater

intensity of concern/worry (r(16) = -.488, p < .05) and greater intensity of mother-rated child

emotional intensity (r(24) = -.381 p < .05; See Table 14) during the infant anger/distress

videos. Additionally, a shift toward greater right frontal activation at medial-frontal sites

during infant neutral videos was related to lower intensity of mother-reported joy during

infant joy videos (r(25) = .434, p < .05; see Table 14). There were no significant relations

between the shift in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry at lateral-frontal sites and the intensity of

mothers’ reported emotional experiences to infant emotion videos (see Table 15). Of note,

mothers described their own infant as expressing primarily anger/frustration (78.8%) in the

infant anger/distress video conditions.

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1d. Does mother’s frontal EEG activation (state measure) moderate the relation

between frontal EEG activity (trait measure) and mothers’ reported emotional experience in

response to their infants’ emotional displays? Given the largely nonsignificant relations

between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during baseline and mothers’ emotional experience in

response to their infants’ emotional displays, as well as in the context of the analyses

described above utilizing a measure of the shift in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry from a

baseline condition to the infant emotion video condition, the moderation analyses were

unnecessary.

Study Aim 2: What is the relation between mothers’ frontal EEG alpha asymmetry and

maternal anxious and depressive symptoms?

2a. Frontal EEG activity (measured at rest; a trait measure) as a correlate of

mothers’ self-reported anxious and depressive symptoms. Correlational analyses were

conducted to examine the hypotheses that greater right frontal activation (negative

asymmetry scores) during the baseline condition would be associated with greater severity of

current anxious and depressive symptoms, as well as a lifetime history of depression

(negative relations). Contrary to expectation, there were no significant relations between

frontal EEG alpha asymmetry at medial-frontal or lateral-frontal sites and mothers’ reported

current or passed depressive symptoms (see Tables 16 & 17). However, as hypothesized,

greater right frontal activation at medial-frontal sites during baseline was associated with

higher T-scores on the SCL-90-R anxiety subscale (r(25) -.429, p < .05; see Table 16). This

relation appeared to be driven by the large correlation with “feeling tense” (r(25) = -.639, p <

.001). There were no significant relations at lateral-frontal sites (see Table 17).

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2b. Frontal EEG activation (measured as mothers view video of their infants’

emotional displays; a state measure) as a correlate of mothers’ self-reported anxious and

depressive symptoms. Correlational analyses were conducted to examine the hypotheses that

greater right frontal activation (negative asymmetry scores) during the infant emotion videos

would be associated with greater severity of current anxious and depressive symptoms, as

well as a lifetime history of depression (negative relations). Contrary to expectations, there

were no significant relations between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during any of the infant

emotion videos at medial-frontal or lateral-frontal sites and mothers’ reported current anxious

or depressive symptoms, nor a lifetime history of depression (see Tables 16 & 17).

2c. Which is a better predictor of mothers’ self-reported anxious and depressive

symptoms: EEG alpha asymmetry as a trait or state measure? Due to largely nonsignificant

relations between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during infant emotion videos and mothers’

self-reported anxious and depressive symptoms, the hypothesis that frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry as a state measure (recorded during infant emotion videos) would better predict

mothers’ self-reported anxious and depressive symptoms than frontal EEG alpha asymmetry

as a trait measure (recorded during baseline) was not tested directly. An alternative measure

of frontal EEG alpha asymmetry was computed, as utilized above in the examination of

mothers’ reported emotional experience to infant emotion videos. Frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry during baseline was subtracted from frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during the

infant emotion videos. Thus, this computed difference score reflects a relative shift toward

greater right or left frontal activation from a previously recorded baseline period to the

infant emotion videos. A parallel approach was also investigated, in which Frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry during the inter-stimulus blank screens during the infant emotion video condition

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was subtracted from frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during the infant emotion videos.

Similarly, this computed difference score reflects a relative shift toward greater right or left

frontal activation from a concurrently recorded “baseline” (i.e. the 15-second blank screens

between each 10-second emotion video presentation) to the infant emotion videos. More

significant results emerged when utilizing the former measure. Therefore, results will be

reported below for the difference scores reflecting a relative shift toward greater right or left

frontal activation videos from a previously recorded baseline period to the infant emotion

videos. Correlations for difference scores reflecting a relative shift toward greater right or

left frontal activation from a concurrently recorded “baseline” (i.e. inter-stimulus blank

screens) to infant emotion can be found in Tables 20 and 21.

Again, frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during infant emotion videos is highly

correlated with frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during the inter-stimulus blank screens (r’s(25)

range from .989 to .995, p < .001). Therefore frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during the inter-

stimulus blank screens was related to mothers’ reported anxious and depressive symptoms at

medial-frontal and lateral-frontal sites in a similar pattern as previously reported for frontal

EEG alpha asymmetry during infant emotion videos (see Tables 16 & 17), and is not reported

here.

A shift toward greater right frontal activation at medial-frontal sites during infant joy

(r(25) = .414, p < .05), infant anger/distress (r(25) = .395, p < .05), and infant neutral (r(25)

= .393, p < .05) videos was associated with lower T-scores on the SCL-90-R anxiety subscale

(see Table 18). There were no significant relations between shift in frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry and current or past depressive symptoms at medial-frontal sites (see Table 18).

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Additionally, there were no significant relations between shift in frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry and depressive or anxious symptoms at lateral-frontal sites (see Tables 19).

2d. Does mother’s frontal EEG activation (state measure) moderate the relation

between frontal EEG activity (trait measure) and mothers’ self-reported anxious and

depressive symptoms? Given the largely nonsignificant relations between frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry during infant emotion videos and mothers’ reported anxious and depressive

symptoms, as well as in the context of the analyses described above utilizing a measure of

the shift in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry from a baseline condition to the infant emotion

video condition, the moderation analyses were unnecessary.

Study Aim 3: What is the relation between mothers’ frontal EEG alpha asymmetry and the

emotional quality of mothers’ parenting?

3a. Frontal EEG activity (measured at rest; a trait measure) as a correlate of

observed maternal emotional availability. Correlational analyses were conducted to examine

the following hypotheses: Greater right frontal activation (negative asymmetry scores) during

the baseline condition would be associated with (1) with less maternal sensitivity and

structuring (positive relations); (2) less child responsiveness and child involvement with the

mother (positive relations); and (3) greater non-intrusiveness and greater non-hostility

(negative relations). There were no significant relations between frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry at medial-frontal and lateral-frontal sites during the baseline and observed

maternal emotional availability (see Tables 22 & 23).

3b. Frontal EEG activation (measured as mothers view video of their infants’

emotional displays; a state measure) as a correlate of observed maternal emotional

availability. Correlational analyses were conducted to examine the following hypotheses: (1)

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greater right frontal activation (negative asymmetry) during all infant emotion videos would

be associated with less maternal sensitivity and structuring (positive relations); (2) greater

right frontal activation (negative asymmetry) during infant anger/distress videos would be

associated with greater non-intrusiveness and greater non-hostility (negative relations); (3)

less clear were predictions of the relation between frontal EEG activation during infant joy

and neutral videos, and mothers’ non-intrusiveness and non-hostility. There were no

significant relations between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry at medial-frontal sites during

infant emotion videos and observed maternal emotional availability (see Table 22). However,

at lateral-frontal sites, greater right frontal activation during infant joy (r(25) = .392, p < .05

), anger/distress videos (r(25) =.383, p < .05) and neutral (r(25) = .386, p < .05) videos and

was associated with less observed maternal non-hostility (i.e. greater hostility; see Table 23).

3c. Which is a better predictor of observed maternal emotional availability: EEG

alpha asymmetry as a trait or state measure? Due to largely nonsignificant relations

between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during baseline and during infant emotion videos and

observed maternal emotional availability, the hypothesis that frontal EEG alpha asymmetry

as a state measure (recorded during infant emotion videos) would better predict observed

maternal emotional availability than frontal EEG alpha asymmetry as a trait measure

(recorded during baseline) was not tested directly. An alternative measure of frontal EEG

alpha asymmetry was computed, as utilized above in the examination of mothers’ reported

emotional experience to infant emotion videos and mothers’ self-reported anxious and

depressive symptoms. Frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during baseline was subtracted from

frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during the infant emotion videos. Thus, this computed

difference score reflects a relative shift toward greater right or left frontal activation from a

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previously recorded baseline period to the infant emotion videos. A parallel approach was

also investigated, in which Frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during the inter-stimulus blank

screens during the infant emotion video condition was subtracted from frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry during the infant emotion videos. Similarly, this computed difference score

reflects a relative shift toward greater right or left frontal activation from a concurrently

recorded “baseline” (i.e. the 15-second blank screens between each 10-second emotion

video presentation) to the infant emotion videos. More significant results emerged for with

the latter measure. Therefore, results will be reported below for the difference scores

reflecting a relative shift toward greater right or left frontal activation from a concurrently

recorded “baseline” (i.e. inter-stimulus blank screens) to infant emotion. Correlations for

difference scores reflecting a relative shift toward greater right or left frontal activation

videos from a previously recorded baseline period to the infant emotion video can be found

in Tables 24 and 25.

Again, frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during infant emotion videos is highly

correlated with frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during the inter-stimulus blank screens (r’s(25)

range from .989 to .995, p < .001). Therefore, frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during the inter-

stimulus blank screens was related to observed maternal emotional availability at medial-

frontal and lateral-frontal sites in a similar pattern as previously reported for frontal EEG

alpha asymmetry during infant emotion videos (see Tables 22 & 23), and is not reported

here. A shift toward greater right frontal activation at medial-frontal sites during infant joy

and anger/distress videos was associated with greater observed maternal sensitivity,

structuring, non-intrusiveness (i.e. less intrusiveness) and non-hostility (i.e. less hostility; see

Table 26). There were no significant relations between shift in frontal EEG activation from

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inter-stimulus blank screens to infant emotion videos at lateral-frontal sites and observed

maternal emotional availability (see Table 27).

3d. Does mother’s frontal EEG activation (state measure) moderate the relation

between frontal EEG activity (trait measure) and observed maternal emotional availability?

Given the largely nonsignificant relations between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during

infant emotion videos and observed maternal emotional availability, as well as in the context

of the analyses described above utilizing a measure of the shift in frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry from a baseline condition to the infant emotion video condition, the moderation

analyses were unnecessary.

Posthoc Analyses

In the analyses described above, significant relations between frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry during emotion videos and mothers’ emotional experiences to infant emotion

videos, self-reported anxious and depressive symptoms, and observed maternal emotional

availability emerged when frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during a baseline (either previously

or concurrently recorded) was controlled for. In order to contextualize these results, the

individual contributions of shifts in the left and right hemispheres to shifts in alpha

asymmetry were investigated. Alpha power is inversely related to frontal EEG activation; A

shift toward greater right frontal activation from frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during the

inter-stimulus blank screens to frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during infant emotion videos

could be a result of an increase in left frontal alpha power (i.e a decrease in left frontal

activation), or a decrease in right frontal alpha power (i.e. an increase in right frontal

activation), or a combination of both.

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Contribution of Individual Hemisphere Changes in Alpha Power to Changes in Alpha

Asymmetry for Infant Joy and Anger/Distress Videos. An increase in lnF3 (left hemisphere)

alpha power predicted a shift toward greater right frontal activation from concurrently

recorded baseline (i.e. inter-stimulus blank screens) to both infant joy and anger/distress

videos. An increase in left alpha power indicates a decrease in activation of that hemisphere.

Thus, frontal EEG alpha asymmetry difference scores reflecting a shift toward greater right

frontal activation are due to the left hemisphere going “offline” during infant joy and

anger/distress video presentations. Increases in left alpha power accounted for 15.6% (infant

joy), and 21.2% (infant anger/distress) of the variance in the negative shift in frontal EEG

alpha asymmetry (infant joy: ß = -.395, p < .05), F(1, 25) = 4.612; infant anger/distress: (ß =

-.461, p < .05), F(1, 25) = 6.735). Change in lnF4 (right hemisphere) alpha power accounted

for 0% (infant joy) and .1% (infant anger/distress) of the variance in the negative shift in

frontal EEG alpha asymmetry (infant joy: ß = .014, p > .05) F(1, 25) = .005; ß = -.035, p >

.05), F(1, 25) = .031).

Contribution of Individual Hemisphere Changes in Alpha Power to Changes in Alpha

Asymmetry for Infant Neutral Videos. Neither changes in lnF3 (left hemisphere) nor lnF4

(right hemisphere) alpha power predicted the negative shift in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry

(increased right frontal activation) from concurrently recorded baseline to infant neutral

videos. An increase in left alpha power accounted for 4.8% of the variance in the decrease in

frontal EEG alpha asymmetry, (ß = -.219, p > .05), F (1, 25) =1.262), and a decrease in right

alpha power accounted for 1.8% of the variance in the decrease in alpha asymmetry, (ß =

.133, p > .05), F(1, 25) = .453).

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CHAPTER IV

DISCUSSION

Theory and empirical study identify parenting as a central contributor to child

psychopathology. Research to date has largely focused on “family address” or static models

of parenting. Such approaches have examined the effects of parental psychopathology (i.e.

Conners’ et al., 2003; Teti & Towe-Goodman, 2010), poverty (i.e. Conger, Conger, Elder, &

Lorenz, 1992), abuse (i.e. Margolin, Gordis, Medina, & Oliver, 2003), and conflict/divorce

(i.e. Amato & Keith, 1991; Grych & Fincham, 1990) on parenting and child outcomes.

However, parenting is a highly complex and emotional process in which input from the child

activates parental cognitions and emotions, which leads to subsequent parental behavior,

which then alters the input from the child, and so on in a recursive fashion. Emotion is at the

core of this process (Dix, 1991). Specifically, it is a parent’s experienced emotion that can

promote or undermine competent parenting. To understand parenting as a dynamic process

therefore necessitates the input of child-created events, the measurement of experienced

emotion as it unfolds in response to this input (Dix’s notion of the “activation” of emotion),

and a link to parental behavior (Dix’s notion of “engagement” of emotion). The tools of

affective neuroscience provide a methodological framework that enables one to capture this

unfolding or “online” emotional experience. Accumulating evidence of the last two decades

suggests that greater relative right frontal electroencephalographic (EEG) activation of the

prefrontal cortical (PFC) (denoted by decreased alpha) reflects approach-oriented emotions

such as joy and anger (Harmon-Jones, 2007), whereas greater right frontal activation reflects

withdrawal-oriented emotions such as sadness and disgust. Alpha asymmetry can be

conceptualized as a trait measure (“affective style” Davidson, 1998), a state measure (Coan,

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Allen, & Harmon-Jones, 2001), or the interaction of both which measures an individual’s

capacity to respond emotionally in an emotional context (Coan, Allen, & McKnight, 2006).

The current study employed each of these approaches – overall affective style,

responding within an emotional context, and ones capacity for responding with an emotional

context – in the investigation of online maternal responsiveness to infant emotion cues. A

constellation of factors comprised the study’s conceptualization of maternal responsiveness:

mothers’ report of experienced emotions in response to their own infant’s emotional displays,

mothers’ reported anxious and depressive symptomatology, and observed emotional

availability during mother-infant free-play interaction. In general, findings from the current

study did not support an association between “affective style” and maternal responsiveness

(See Table 28for a summary of findings for the baseline condition). Furthermore,

associations between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry within an emotional context and

maternal responsiveness were limited. In contrast, a shift in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry

from a baseline condition to the emotional context, conceptualized as mothers’ capacity to

respond within an emotional context, was related to mothers’ experienced emotions when

seeing their infant’s emotional displays, severity of mothers’ anxiety symptoms, and

maternal emotional availability (see Table 29 or a summary of findings for the infant emotion

video conditions). The overall findings also reflected a match between negative emotionality

in mothers and their infants. In other words, mothers’ frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during

their infant’s displays of anger/distress were linked to multiple negative emotions in mothers,

but the same was not true for positive emotionality (i.e. mothers’ frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry during their infant’s displays of joy was unrelated to mothers’ intensity of

experienced joy). Mothers demonstrated an overall pattern of right frontal activation in

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response to infant displayed emotions, regardless of emotional valence. Additionally,

mothers demonstrated a shift toward greater relative right frontal activation from a baseline

condition to the emotional context, and that shift was driven by a decrease in left frontal

activation rather than an increase in right frontal activation. However, this was only true for

shifts during infant joy and infant anger/distress. Lastly, the current study demonstrated a

medial vs. lateral distinction in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry as it relates to maternal

responsiveness; most of the significant associations emerged for frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry assessed at medial frontal sites.

“Affective Style” & Maternal Responsiveness

Affective style (i.e. frontal EEG alpha asymmetry as a trait measure, assessed during

a baseline condition; Davidson, 1998) is a reliable predictor of state-dependent emotional

responses (i.e. an individual’s subjective emotional experience in response to an emotional

situation). It appears to tap a propensity to respond emotionally given an emotion situation.

Individuals with greater left frontal activity at rest respond to positive emotion situations with

greater reported positive emotions than those with greater right frontal activity at rest.

Conversely, individuals with greater right frontal activity at rest respond to negative emotion

situations with greater reported negative emotions than those with greater left frontal activity

at rest. A conceptualization of affective style as a diathesis for the development of affective

disorders was derived from these findings, and a substantial body of empirical data has

demonstrated an association between right frontal activity at rest and symptoms of depression

and anxiety (Nitschke, Heller, Palmieri & Miller, 1999; Sutton and Davidson, 1997;

Thibodeau, Jorgensen, & Kim, 2006; Tomarken et al., 1992). Furthermore, evidence that

affective style may be a diathesis for affect disorders is relevant to the study of parenting in

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that maternal depression has been shown to undermine competent parenting. Depressed

mothers are more inattentive, unresponsive and less sensitive in caregiving than non-

depressed mothers. They often fail to provide an adequately structured environment for the

child, and there is an absence of pleasure and positive affect within the mother-child dyad

(Gelfand & Teti, 1990; Teti & Towe-Goodman, 2010). Emotions arising in the parenting

context can promote or undermine competent parenting practices. The current study

examined the relation between affective style and the nature of maternal responsiveness:

mothers’ experienced emotions in an emotional context, depressive and anxious

symptomatology, and observed maternal emotional availability.

Surprisingly, the current study did not find the expected relations between affective

style (frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during baseline) and mothers’ experienced emotions in

an emotional context or observed maternal emotional availability. It may be that mothers’

emotional responding to their own infant is more situational or state-dependent than a

reflection of individual differences in trait-like approach or withdrawal motivational

tendencies. Parenting may be a unique emotional experience; positive and negative emotions

in the parenting context may hold an entirely different meaning than positive and negative

emotions to less personally relevant stimuli. Globally, positive and negative emotions

involve personal goal attainment or failure. In the parenting context, however, positive and

negative emotions may reflect an interaction between both parent- and child-oriented goals

and concerns (Dix, 1991; Leerkes & Crockenberg, 2007). This may partly account for the

lack of association in the current study between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry as a trait

measure and state-dependent emotional responses and observed emotional availability during

parent-child interaction. Emotional responding to ones own infant involves more than

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personal or individual goals and concerns. The current study utilized ecologically valid and

highly relevant stimuli to the parenting context – ones own infant. The unique nature of these

stimuli may have elicited a different pattern of emotional responding than has been

demonstrated by previous studies, which have typically used videos of actors displaying

emotions (e.g. Davidson et al., 1990), voluntary facial movements by the participants (e.g.

Coan et al., 2001), and video scenes of positive and negative events (e.g. Reeves et al., 1989).

Affective style may be too broad of a measure and too far removed from the parenting

context to account for individual differences in parenting. That is to say that a parent’s

propensity to respond emotionally given an emotion situation is not as sensitive of a measure

as a parent’s capacity to respond within the unfolding emotional parenting context (i.e.

seeing their own infant express a range of emotions). As will be discussed below, significant

associations between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry and parenting behavior emerged when

this capacity for responding (a shift in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry from baseline to the

infant emotion videos) was assessed.

It is also noteworthy that the current study found no significant associations between

affective style and depressive symptoms, which is in stark contrast to a large body of

research in this domain demonstrating a consistent link between right frontal activity at rest

and depressive symptoms (i.e. Sutton and Davidson, 1997; Thibodeau, Jorgensen, & Kim,

2006; Tomarken et al., 1992). However, greater right frontal activity at rest was in fact

associated with greater reported anxiety in the current study. Although participants in the

current study reported a range of depression and anxiety scores on a self-report measure of

symptoms, none of the mothers reported symptoms within the clinical range (i.e. T-scores >

69), and most scores would be considered within normal limits. It may be that affective style

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is a better predictor of more severe affective symptomatology, even if it is sub-threshold, and

less useful as a marker of normative variance in depressive symptoms within a non-clinical

sample. Findings from the current study, however, suggest that frontal EEG alpha asymmetry

at rest may serve as a marker for anxiety, even when considering normal variation within a

non-clinical sample. Empirical investigations of anxiety and frontal EEG alpha asymmetry

have been mixed. To account for variability in these findings, Heller and colleagues (i.e.

Nitschke, Heller, Palmieri & Miller, 1999; Heller, Nitschke, Etienne & Miller, 1997) have

suggested a distinction between “anxious arousal” and “anxious apprehension,” with the

former involving physiological arousal and hyper-reactivity under panic conditions, and the

latter involving worry and verbal rumination. In an examination of this framework,

Mathersul, Williams, Hopkinson, and Kemp (2008) demonstrated that right frontal activity

during a baseline condition was associated with higher anxious arousal, whereas left frontal

activity was associated with higher anxious apprehension. Viewed within this context,

mothers with greater right frontal activity at rest may be those mothers who experience

higher levels of physiological arousal. In fact, the significant association between frontal

EEG alpha asymmetry at rest and anxiety symptoms appears to have been largely driven by

the strong association with mothers’ endorsement of the single item of “feeling tense.”

State-Dependent Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry & Maternal Responsiveness

Studies involving the examination of frontal EEG alpha asymmetry as a state rather

than trait measure have demonstrated that changes in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry can be

reliably elicited through a range of emotional paradigms. Empirical evidence supports the

proposition that environmental situations that evoke approach or withdrawal tendencies are

associated with left or right frontal activation, respectively (i.e. Coan, Allen, & Harmon-

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Jones, 2001; Davison et al., 1990; Harmon-Jones et al., 2003). Contrary to expectations, a

pattern of right frontal activation emerged for all environmental situations (i.e. all infant

emotion videos, regardless of emotion valence).

Furthermore, the current study demonstrated that mothers with greater right frontal

activation during all infant video conditions perceived their infants as expressing a greater

intensity of positive emotions in joy and neutral videos, and they were more likely to endorse

feeling irritability/anger when seeing their infant in distress. There were no significant

relations between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during the infant emotion video and anxious

or depressive symptoms. Lastly, greater right frontal activation during the infant joy and

anger/distress videos only was related to lower non-hostility (i.e. greater hostility) in

observed parent-child interaction. There was a limited range of observed maternal hostility in

the current sample, with instances of hostility typically reflecting negative emotionality and

covert rather than overt displays of hostility toward the child.

In the context of the motivational direction model of frontal EEG alpha asymmetry

(Harmon-Jones et al., 2003), these findings would suggest that mothers were experiencing a

withdrawal motivation when viewing their infants, regardless of the infant’s emotional state.

The recent investigations of Light and colleagues, however, provides a useful heuristic within

which to interpret the findings of the current study. This group has investigated how shifts in

frontal EEG alpha asymmetry may not only reflect approach or withdrawal motivations, but

also signal whether the induced emotional state is internally or externally focused. They

contend that withdrawal motivation could include both negative and positive emotion states

that are internally focused, such as sadness and contentment. In an analogous body of work,

Harmon-Jones (Harmon-Jones et al., 2003) has demonstrated that approach motivations can

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include both negative and positive emotion states that are externally focused, and showed

that anger is associated with left frontal activation. Thus, using an internal/external

framework in the study of emotional responding, Light, Coan, Frye, Goldsmith, and

Davidson (2009a) examined whether varying intensities of positive emotions were

differentially reflected in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry. They examined contentment

because of its qualities as internally-focused, with a limited outward display of positive

emotion, and a lack of action-orientation. In their study of over 100 children, age 6-10, Light

et al. (2009a) found that the rate of accelerating pleasure during an enjoyable task was linked

to the rate of growth in relative left frontal activation as the task unfolded. In contrast, those

children who experienced unchanging moderate pleasure as the task unfolded showed a

pattern of decreasing left frontal and increasing right frontal activation as the task unfolded.

They propose that such a pattern reflects a non-approach positive emotion – contentment – as

well as a form of affective working memory, serving to propagate calm, positive emotional

states over time. Perhaps mothers in the current study were experiencing a low-level,

positive, and internally-focused emotion – contentment – when seeing their infants in a

context that did not permit nor require their intervention, especially if they perceived their

infants as experiencing high intensity positive affect. This could then contribute to the

subjective experience of irritability/anger when mothers saw their infant in a state of distress.

Although not addressed in the current study, it would have been informative to have mothers

indicate whether their irritability/anger was directed toward their infant, themselves, or the

circumstances/person eliciting the infant negative affect.

The stimuli used in the current study would not necessarily elicit an approach-

motivation in mothers, even when the infants were expressing distress, as there was no

87

possibility of intervention. Additionally, mothers consented to the procedures used to elicit

positive and negative emotions from their infants, and were aware of the time lapse between

the video recordings and the lab visit, providing ample time to be confident that their infant

was not experiencing any continual distress from the procedures used.

Lastly, evidence from neuroimaging studies of autobiographical memory have

important implications for the current study. Autobiographical memory involves memory for

information and events pertaining to ones life. It is likely that the unique stimuli employed –

ones own infant – activated autobiographical memory due to its highly personal nature.

Investigations using fMRI have demonstrated bilateral activation during autobiographical

memory, but greater right than left activation in the orbital prefrontal cortex particularly

when emotional events were probed directly (e.g. Andreasen et al., 1995; Niki & Luo, 2002;

Nyberg et al., 2002). The predominant right frontal activation in the current study, regardless

of the valence of infant emotional expression, may have been influenced by the stimuli’s

activation of autobiographical memory.

Mothers’ responses to infant emotion stimuli, much like affective style, may be too

broad of a measure and still too far removed from the parenting context to account for

individual differences in parenting. That is to say that a parent’s emotional response during

infant emotion displays that are removed from an interactive context may not be as sensitive

of a measure as a parent’s capacity for responding within the unfolding emotional parenting

context (i.e. seeing their own infant express a range of emotions), which will be discussed

below.

A Shift from Baseline to State-Dependent Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry & Maternal

Responsiveness

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There were very few relations between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry as a state

measure and mothers’ experienced emotions in an emotional context and observed maternal

emotional availability. Additionally, there were no significant relations between frontal EEG

alpha asymmetry as a state measure and depressive and anxious symptoms. Thus, at first

pass, there was little evidence in the current study to support the capability model: individual

differences in asymmetry will be more pronounced during emotion-elicitation procedures

than during baseline, and will also demonstrate stronger relations with emotion-related

constructs than individual differences in asymmetry at rest (Coan, Allen, & McKnight,

2006).

The capability model examines an individual’s capacity for approach or withdrawal

given situational demands. Although the current study did not demonstrate initial support for

the capability model when frontal EEG alpha asymmetry was measured during emotion-

elicitation tasks, an alternate approach proved to be very informative. By subtracting

mothers’ affective style (frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during a baseline condition) from

their state-dependent frontal EEG alpha asymmetry (measured during infant emotion videos),

we examined only mothers’ shift toward greater right or left frontal EEG activation with the

onset of infant emotion videos. Conceptually, such a measure might be a more sensitive

measure of individual differences in the capacity to respond in emotional contexts. This shift

reflects the degree to which mothers change relative to their motivational predispositions.

Evidence from the current study suggests that examination of this shift in frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry from a baseline to an emotional context may be the most important marker of

maternal responsiveness, as many more relations emerged with emotion-related constructs.

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The most striking pattern to emerge from analyses of the shift in frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry was that a shift toward right frontal activation during all three infant emotion

videos was associated with mothers’ experienced emotions predominantly during the infant

anger/distress video. That is to say that a shift in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry was unrelated

to mothers’ experienced emotions when they saw their infant in a positive or neutral/content

state (infant joy and neutral videos), and was only related to their experienced emotions when

they saw their infant in distress. This was particularly the case if the shift in frontal EEG

alpha asymmetry was measured during the infant anger/distress video. Mothers experiencing

a shift toward greater right frontal activation during the infant anger/distress video endorsed

irritability/anger, did not endorse joy, experienced greater intensities of sadness and concern,

and perceived their child as showing a greater intensity anger/distress.

It might be expected that within-condition associations would be the strongest (i.e.

shift in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during infant anger/distress would be expected to be

more strongly associated with mothers’ experienced emotions during that same infant

emotion video condition) given the emotional congruence. Due to the lack of variability in

positive emotions experienced by mothers during infant joy videos (100% of participants

endorsed joy), the relation between shift in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during infant joy

and mothers’ experience of joy could not be examined. Despite this, it could also be argued

that a parent’s capacity to respond to their infant is best captured, and perhaps most

important, during challenging situations (i.e. Leerkes, Blankson, & O'Brien, 2009). Findings

from the current study would support a notion that a shift toward right frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry during a challenging emotional situation corresponded with a complex

constellation of emotions. Findings from the current study appeared to reflect affect-

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matching between mother and infant: negative emotions and concern were experienced by

the mother during a display of negative infant emotion. This, in the context of a shift toward

right frontal activation (a potential reflection of non-approach oriented contentment) might

actually be suggestive of maternal empathetic concern.

Once again, the recent work of Light and colleagues, with their examination of

internally/externally-focused emotions, provides a framework within which to interpret the

findings of the current study. Similar to their investigation of contentment, Light, Coan,

Zahn-Waxler, Frye, Goldsmith, and Davidson (2009b) examined empathy and patterns of

frontal EEG alpha asymmetry. Empathy refers to the experience of emotions from someone

else’s perspective. Empathy is, arguably, an internally focused emotion that can be positive

or negative. Light et al. (2009) make a distinction between empathetic concern (i.e.

experiencing feelings of goodwill and concern in response to someone’s distress), empathetic

cheerfulness (i.e. a tendency to exude positive emotion in response to the negative emotions

of another as a means to alleviate another’s suffering) and empathetic happiness (i.e. positive

affect sharing). They argue that empathy is an internal representation of another’s emotional

state, accompanied by a feeling of goodwill within the empathizing individual. Thus, it is an

internally-focused emotion, like contentment, and would therefore be expected to elicit

greater right frontal activation. Behavioral manifestations of empathy were coded in 6-10

year old children during an empathy task, and frontal EEG alpha asymmetry was measured

on an independent occasion during a pleasurable task. Interestingly, those children rated high

on empathetic concern during the empathy task showed a pattern of frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry during a pleasurable task that began with greater relative right frontal activation,

and shifted to greater left frontal activation over the course of the pleasurable task. Those

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children rated high on empathetic happiness exhibited and maintained relatively equal left

and right frontal activation over the course of the pleasurable task. Finally those children

rated high on empathetic cheerfulness exhibited consistent left frontal EEG alpha activation

over the course of the pleasurable task.

Of note, this study employed an independent measure of empathy that was not

acquired concurrently with the recording of frontal EEG alpha asymmetry, and it was

measured in children, not adults. However, it provides a scaffold for understanding the

complex construct of empathetic concern and how it may be reflected in frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry. Empathy involves the internal representation of the emotion state of another.

This internally-focused emotion might therefore be expected to relate to greater right frontal

activation. Interestingly, individual hemisphere contributions to the shift toward right frontal

EEG alpha asymmetry in the current study indicated that during infant joy and infant

anger/distress, left hemisphere activation was decreasing, rather than right hemisphere

activation increasing. Thus, mothers did not become more withdrawn when seeing their

infant express emotion, but rather they became less approach-oriented. It is a decrease in left

frontal activation that appears to be consistent with a feeling of contentment and an

empathetic response, rather than an increase in right frontal activation.

It is customary in the frontal EEG alpha asymmetry literature to discuss relative

hemispheric activation when it is used as a trait or state measure. However, the current study

also examined a shift in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry from baseline to an emotional context.

As a result, change in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry was examined, and findings from the

current study suggest that an assessment of individual hemispheric contributions to that

change is necessary in order to contextualize the relations between frontal EEG alpha

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asymmetry and maternal responsiveness. Therefore, it may be more accurate to discuss

changes in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry as reflecting a decrease in left activation, rather

than a shift toward greater right frontal activation. Although a decrease in approach-

motivation is conceptually different than an increase in withdrawal-motivation, it still

remains an empirical question as to whether it is the relative nature of the resulting

asymmetry (i.e. right activation is still relatively greater than left activation) or the change in

each hemisphere (i.e. decreasing left activation) that is most crucial in understanding

maternal responsiveness.

In the Light et al. (2009b) study, the children high on empathetic concern maintained

greater right frontal activation for well beyond the first 30 seconds of the task before shifting

toward greater left-frontal activation. The current study recorded frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry during emotion epochs that were only one-third that amount of time – 10

seconds. The pattern of findings in the current study may be reflective of the initial stages of

an empathetic concern response by mothers to seeing their infant in distress. It would be

interesting to investigate a longer time course in future studies in order to examine shifts in

frontal EEG alpha asymmetry as they unfold during an emotional event.

In addition to these intriguing findings, which are suggestive of an empathetic

process, the current study also demonstrated that a shift toward greater right frontal activation

during infant expressions of both positive and negative emotions were related to more

sensitive parenting, structuring, non-intrusiveness, and non-hostility. A shift toward greater

right frontal EEG activation during infant neutral displays, however, was unrelated to

parenting behavior. This differential pattern of association suggests that a parent’s capacity to

respond emotionally to infant expressed emotion, and not just to the infant him- or her-self, is

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intimately linked with parenting behavior. Taken together, these findings that a shift toward

greater right frontal activation was associated with mothers’ seemingly empathetic response

to infant anger/distress, along with competent parenting, is congruent with Dix’s (1992)

discussion of the critical role of parental empathy in parental responsiveness. Similar to his

thesis on the affective organization of parenting, Dix (1992) proposed that there are several

cognitive and affective consequences for a parent who has child-centered, empathetic goals.

Cognitively, parents must attempt to understand what children are feeling and thinking in

order to facilitate their child’s goal attainment. Additionally, events evoke parental emotion

directly as well as indirectly through their effect on a parent’s child. Given these important

components, empathetic parenting serves to organize sensitive, responsive parenting. Several

studies have empirically demonstrated a link between parental empathy and parental

competency (i.e. Coyne et al., 2007; Leerkes, Crockenberg, & Burrous). For example, Coyne

et al (2007) developed an Empathetic Understanding Assessment (EUA) coding scheme to

assess mothers’ empathetic responding to pre-recorded mother-toddler challenging

interactions. They found that mothers who were better able to consider their child’s

perspective, motivations, thoughts and behaviors in the videotape experienced a greater

intensity of emotion themselves, and were rated by independent observers to be more

sensitive in free-play interactions with their child.

Competent parenting strategies involve attempts to maintain positive infant emotion

as well as alleviate infant distress. Of particular interest in the current study is the change in

direction of association between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during infant emotion videos

and observed maternal non-hostility before and after subtracting frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry from a baseline condition. Greater right frontal activation during infant joy and

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infant anger/distress videos was associated with more observed hostility in mothers.

However, the shift toward greater right frontal activation from baseline to the infant emotion

videos was associated with less hostility. This suggests that an individual’s emotional

responding within an emotional context provides a very different index of “online”

responsiveness than ones capacity for change. A shift toward greater right frontal activation

was related to less observed hostility. Perhaps those mothers with greater flexibility in

situational responding are those that can respond more sensitively to their children. This also

lends support to the capability model in that it allows for the possibility that capacity for

emotions and motivations can differ from one situation to another.

It was also particularly interesting that a shift toward right frontal activation from

baseline to any infant emotion video was associated with less anxiety in mothers. This

finding was in stark contrast to the association between right frontal activation and more

anxiety during baseline, and the lack of association with anxiety when examining frontal

EEG asymmetry within the video conditions alone. Again, it seems that frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry as a trait measure, as a state measure, and the capacity for change are all different

markers of maternal responsiveness within the parenting context. We would contend that a

mother’s capacity to shift toward a more internally focused, low-level positive

affect/contentment at seeing their infant express a range of emotions, in a context in which

there is no opportunity to intervene, is synonymous with lower anxiety. Although mothers

who are more right frontal at baseline may be more anxious in general (but within the non-

clinical range of severity), mothers with the capacity for empathetic concern and the

experience of contentment in a parenting context are less likely to be anxious when they see

their infant express a range of emotions. Furthermore, the current findings are congruent with

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neuroimaging work by Swain et al (2004) suggesting that after an initial postpartum period

(i.e. 2-4 weeks postpartum), there is a shift in regional brain responses reflecting a decrease

in amygdala activation and new activation in medial prefrontal cortical and hypothalamic

(hormone control) regions. Such as shift is suggestive of less parental anxiety in response to

infant signals (i.e. crying) and greater association of infant signals with social behaviors and

routines.

Taken together, the findings of the current study suggest that affective style and

emotional responding within emotion-elicitation events cannot capture the full picture of

maternal responsiveness as measured by frontal EEG. Rather, the examination of mothers’

capacity for change/flexibility given an emotional context provides a more panoramic view

of maternal responsiveness to infant cues.

Medial vs. Lateral Findings

The current study demonstrated a trend toward more significant associations between

frontal EEG alpha asymmetry and maternal responsiveness (i.e. maternal experienced

emotions, anxious and depressive symptomatology, and observed emotional availability) at

medial-frontal rather than lateral-frontal sites. Several intriguing bodies of work may help

explain this trend. In their comprehensive review of the functional neuroanatomy of the

human orbitofrontal cortex, Kringelbach and Rolls (2004) identify a medial vs. lateral trend

based on a meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies. More specifically, medial orbitofrontal

cortex activity appears to be related to decoding and monitoring the reward value of many

different reinforcers such as money (O’Doherty et al., 2001) or facial expressions

(Kringelbach & Rolls, 2003), whereas lateral orbitofrontal cortex activity appears to be

related to the evaluation of punishers subsequently affecting behavior. The study utilizing

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facial expressions as a reinforcer is of particular relevance to the current study given the

nature of the stimuli – human faces. Using a probabilistic reversal-learning task design,

participants were instructed to select one of two neutral faces. Upon making their selection,

the facial expression changed to a “happy” or “angry” face. Through trial-and-error

participants learned which face selections had a higher probability of changing to a “happy”

face (i.e. successful trial). Thus, an “angry” face signaled a need for a change in behavior (i.e.

different selection due to an unsuccessful trial). Once participants completed a specified

number of successful trials indicating that they had learned the probabilities, the probabilities

changed without any cues and participants had to adapt to this reversal. Participants also

completed a similar task where they selected one of two “angry” faces that then changed to a

“happy” face (i.e. successful trial) or became a “neutral” face (i.e. unsuccessful trial). Lateral

parts of the orbitofrontal cortex became activated when a behavior change was signaled,

regardless of the valence of the facial expression (i.e. “angry” vs. “neutral” signals for

change).

Given the nature of the stimuli in the current study, no behavioral response/action was

indicated for the mothers. In fact, the global pattern of greater right frontal activation,

regardless of infant emotional valence, would suggest that the task did not elicit approach

motivation (which is arguably associated with behavioral action/change), and is congruent

with the notion that mothers were more likely in a state in which they were monitoring the

reward value of seeing their own infants, with no signal for behavioral change. Furthermore,

such a pattern is congruent with the above discussed interpretations that mothers were

experiencing internally-focused contentment and empathetic concern while viewing videos

of their own infants expressing various emotions.

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Additionally, the prefrontal cortex plays an important roll in contextual recollection;

that is to say the context within which an event occurred. In an attempt to characterize the

roll of the anterior prefrontal cortex in this process utilizing fMRI, Simons et al. (2005)

identified lateral regions of the PFC to be involved in the early retrieval specification stages

of recollection – the readiness to make memory judgments – and medial regions to be

involved in later stages such as in monitoring and verification. More specifically, medial

regions of the PFC were activated at the time during a memory task when an external

stimulus signaled the participant to recall an earlier judgment they had made about the

stimulus (i.e. whether it was pleasant or unpleasant), and peaked in intensity at a later time

point than lateral sites. Simons et al. (2005) contend that this reflects stimulus-oriented

processing of information that was internally generated (i.e. a value judgment). Furthermore,

studies have demonstrated a deactivation in lateral prefrontal cortex and other areas

associated with cognitive processing (i.e. working memory, attention) during emotional

autobiographical memory retrieval studies (Fink et al., 1996; Gemar et al, 1996). One could

argue that nature of the stimuli in the current study, which are very personally relevant,

engaged episodic/autobiographical memory processes (i.e. numerous encounters with ones

child expressing emotion). Seeing ones own infant may have cued internally-generated

judgments from a long history of parent-infant interactions, which would be reflected in

greater medial activation with lateral deactivation.

Finally, differences in heritability of medial frontal and lateral frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry are of interest to the current study. Given the stability of frontal EEG alpha

asymmetry at baseline and its association with liability for mood disorders, Anokhin, Heath,

and Myers (2005) examined whether asymmetry could serve as an endophenotype of mood

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disorders. Their investigation of identical and fraternal young adult female twins found a

modest degree of heritability of frontal EEG alpha asymmetry during baseline at medial

frontal sites, with 27% of observed individual differences in this measure attributable to

genetic factors, and 73% to individually specific environmental factors. However, there was

no evidence for a genetic influence at lateral frontal sites. It is interesting that the majority of

associations between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry and maternal responsiveness in the

current study involved medial frontal sites where measured frontal EEG alpha asymmetry has

a higher genetic influence. The finding that related individuals are more likely to resemble

each other in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry at medial sites may be reflective of a similar

pattern of emotionality in family members. Since the current study used mothers’ own infants

as the emotional stimuli, there may have been greater synchrony between how the child

experiences/expresses emotion, and how the mother experiences/expresses emotion, leading

to a stronger link between the two as measured by EEG. However, heritability estimates were

based on frontal EEG alpha asymmetry at rest (i.e. during a baseline condition), and it is

unclear whether the capacity for change in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry, given an emotional

context, also has a genetic influence.

Limitations and Future Directions

Findings from the current study demonstrated that mothers’ capacity for responding

within an emotional context was a better marker of maternal experienced emotions, maternal

anxiety, and observed emotional availability than affective style or absolute responding

within an emotional context. Furthermore, a capacity for change to greater right frontal

activation in during an emotional context was related to maternal affect-matching in response

to infant distress, more competent parenting, and lower anxiety. The strengths of the current

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study include the ecologically valid and personally relevant infant emotion videos, the range

of emotional contexts including infant displays of joy, anger/distress, as well as neutral

contentment, and the measurement of maternal responsiveness from multiple perspectives

including self-report and observation. The present study is the first to capture frontal EEG

alpha asymmetry in mothers as they respond to video of their infants, and the first to measure

“online” maternal responsiveness utilizing EEG. This unique methodology suggests several

avenues for future investigation of online maternal responsiveness to infant emotion cues.

First, the affective chronometry investigations of Light and colleagues (Light et al.,

2009a; Light et al., 2009b) suggest that studying change in parental emotional experience

over the course of unfolding parent-child interactions may further explicate the nature of

parental responsiveness. It may be that in addition to parents’ capacity for emotional

experience, the rate and degree to which emotional experiences shift during parent-infant

contexts are linked to emotion regulation and parents’ abilities for competent parenting.

Additionally, the current study only used mothers’ own infants as the emotional stimuli.

Future investigations of EEG as an index of online maternal responsiveness must employ a

control condition of an unfamiliar infant in order to truly identify a parenting response versus

a more general response to an infant.

Future research should also investigate online maternal responsiveness at different

developmental stages (i.e. infancy, toddlerhood, childhood). Additionally, the types of

positive and negative child emotions that could be used as emotion stimuli could range to fit

the developmental period (i.e. noncompliance episodes in toddlers, successful completion of

a puzzle by young children). The nature of maternal responsiveness and its link to parenting

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behaviors becomes more complex over time as the repertoire of child-created emotional

events grows to meet the advancing development of the child.

Furthermore, patterns of frontal EEG alpha asymmetry in the current study, as a

reflection of affective/motivational responding, might have been different if mothers believed

they could take action to maintain infant positive affect or alleviate infant distress. Future

work might attempt to incorporate methods by which mothers could take some form of

action. For instance, if mothers believed that their infant’s anger/distress expressions were

live, and they were given a method by which they could intervene (i.e. press a button that

would turn on soothing music in the infant’s room), a different approach/withdrawal

motivation pattern might be activated.

The present study was also limited by a small sample size, and thus had limited power

to detect anything but large effects. In fact, many correlations in the present study exceeded

.30 – a “medium” effect size (Cohen, 1992) – but did not reach significance at the p < .05

level. Additionally, limited significant findings and low power precluded the use of advanced

statistical analyses including the originally proposed moderation analyses. A larger sample

size would permit the investigation of additional moderators of maternal responsiveness,

such as parity. Studies have demonstrated that maternal responsiveness at the level of the

brain changes over time as the parent-infant relationship develops (i.e. Swain et al., 2004). It

might also be possible that the level of parental experience (i.e. duration of parenthood and

the number of previous children a parent has raised) would influence online maternal

responsiveness.

Lastly, despite a wide range of internalizing symptoms endorsed by mothers in the

present study, levels of depression and anxiety were sub-clinical. A larger sample, including

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participants with clinical levels of internalizing symptoms, might shed light as to the nature

of online maternal responsiveness to infant cues within a clinically depressed or anxious

population, and how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors associated with these disorders serves

to undermine parental competence.

Continued investigations of the nature of online emotional responding in parents has

the potential to help clarify normative maternal response to infant cues, detect maladaptive

response patterns, and identify potential targets for psychological intervention. Such

investigations can inform our understanding of those factors that place parenting at risk, and

thereby undermine healthy child development.

Implications

Results of the current study suggest that frontal EEG alpha asymmetry as a trait

measure appears limited as an index of online maternal responsiveness. Rather, mothers’

capacity/flexibility for emotional responding appears to be a promising marker of online

maternal emotions and subsequent parenting behaviors. A shift toward greater right frontal

EEG activation in response to infant emotion cues was associated with negative affect-

matching, less anxiety, and adaptive parenting behaviors, suggestive of an empathetic

process. The methodology employed in the current study provides a unique window into

understanding maternal responsiveness that is not captured by self-reported or observed

emotions alone. Furthermore, the lack of association between frontal EEG alpha asymmetry

as a trait measure suggests maternal responsiveness may be a malleable rather than

dispositional construct, and may perhaps respond to intervention. Thus, investigations of this

nature may aid in the identification of risk within the parenting context, and inform family

interventions that promote healthy child development.

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Interventions aimed at promoting more empathetic, responsive parenting may involve

skills training for parents’ behavioral responses to challenging child events. However,

findings from the current study suggest that effective interventions might also need to target

processes occurring earlier in parent-child interactions, namely the generation of emotions

and emotion regulation capabilities. In 2001, James Gross proposed a process model for

emotion regulation in adulthood in which emotion could be regulated at different points in

the emotion-generative process. Antecedent-focused emotion regulation strategies that can

be employed early in the emotion-generative process include: situation selection – making a

choice about which situations to place yourself in, depending on how the options will make

you feel; situation modification – either enhancing or reducing the emotional impact of an

event; attentional deployment – focusing on some aspects of a situation while ignoring others

in order to regulate mood; and cognitive change – selecting among several different possible

meanings to apply to a particular aspect of the situation. A response-focused emotion

regulation strategy that can be employed after an emotion has been evoked is response

modulation – attempting to influence the emotion response tendencies. Antecedent-focused

strategies have been shown to be more effective in decreasing emotional, behavioral, and

physiological responding (i.e. Gross & Levenson, 1993), because they involve a process of

cognitively neutralizing a potentially emotional situation. Although a response-focused

strategy reduces outward behavioral expression of the emotion, it does not impact the

emotional experience and can actually increase physiological responding due to the energy

expended inhibiting the ongoing experience and behavioral tendencies.

Quickly-occurring shifts in frontal EEG alpha asymmetry in response to child

emotional displays holds promise as a marker for risk within the parenting context. These

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shifts may capture a parent’s capacity/flexibility for emotional responding that is outside

conscious awareness, but nevertheless malleable. This suggests that parenting interventions

should target parental emotion regulation skills that are antecedent-focused, and involve

cognitive change rather than response modulation within the context of challenging parent-

child interactions.

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122

M (SD) or % Range

Mother CharacteristicsAge in years: M (SD) 30.67 (5.07) 22-45Race: % Caucasian 85.20%Education: % Bachelor's Degree 40.70%Employment: % Not Employed 66.70%Income: < $60,000 50.00%Marital Status: % Married 92.60%Parity: % Primiparous 44.40%

Child CharacteristicsAge in months: M (SD) 6.94 (0.81) 5.57-8.67Sex: % Female 51.90%

Table 1. Participant Demographics

Left: lnF3 Right: lnF4

Joy 0.02 (1.13) -0.31 (1.22) -0.15 (0.22)Anger/Distress 0.07 (1.14) -0.28 (1.20) -0.10 (0.22)Neutral/Interest 0.06 (1.14) -0.27 (1.23) -0.10 (0.22)Totals 0.05 (0.22) -0.29 (0.23)

Infant Emotion Video

Hemisphere M (SD) Totals

M (SD)

Table 3. Alpha Power by Infant Emotion Video and Hempisphere of EEG Recording

Mothers' Reported Experienced Emotions

Infant Joy Video 1

Infant Joy Video 2

Infant Neutral Video

Infant Anger / Distress Video 1

Infant Anger / Distress Video 2

Joy 26 (100%) 27 (100%) 23 (85.2%) 3 (11.1%) 5 (18.5%) Irritability/Anger 0 (0%) 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) 6 (23.1%) 6 (22.2%) Sadness 1 (3.7%) 1 (3.7%) 2 (7.4%) 21 (77.8%) 17 (63.0%) Fear 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) 11 (40.7%) 7 (25.9%) Disgust 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) 1 (3.7%) 0 (0.0%) Concern/Worry 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) 17 (63.0%) 13 (48.1%) Embarrassment 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) Guilt 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) 0 (0.0%) 7 (25.9%) 6 (22.2%)

Table 2. Frequency of Mothers Reporting "Yes" to Various Emotions During Infant Emotion Videos

123

Infant Neutral Video r (N)

Endorsed Emotion:

Joy Irrit. / Anger Sadness Anx. /

FearConc. / Worry Guilt Joy

-.365 -.078 .119 .225 .149 .095 .080(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

-.025 -.443* .018 -.145 -.010 -.227 .058(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.036 -.464* .019 -.118 -.054 -.260 .061(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

0.11 -.423* 0.24 -.125 -.018 -.253 .047(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

-.036 -.415* .004 -.119 -.029 -.282 .027(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

Joy Irrit. / Anger Sadness Anx. /

FearConc. / Worry Guilt

-.242 -.056 .258 .157 -.026 -.004(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

-.195 -.147 .192 .275 -.123 .031(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

-.128 -.164 .166 .303 -.144 .022(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

-.174 -.128 .187 .302 -.133 .013(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

-.196 -.110 .168 .300 -.151 .025(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

Infant Joy

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F4/F3) During Video Display

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F4/F3) During Video Display

Inter-Stimulus Blanks

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Neutral

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Neutral

Inter-Stimulus Blanks

8 min. Baseline

Infant Joy

Infant Anger/Distress Video 1 r (N)

Table 4. F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers' Endorsement of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos

8 min. Baseline

Mothers’ Endorsed (Yes/No) Emotion:

Infant Anger/Distress Video 2 r (N)

Mothers’ Endorsed (Yes/No) Emotion:

124

Infant Neutral Video r (N)

Endorsed Emotion:

Joy Irrit. / Anger Sadness Anx. /

FearConc. / Worry Guilt Joy

-.247 -.113 .015 .238 -.035 -.021 .132(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.087 -.271 .088 .070 .023 -.269 .034(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.109 -.261 .089 .081 .009 -.267 .032(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.100 -.258 .083 .071 .022 -.273 .037(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.085 -.254 .085 .079 .017 -.276 .026(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

Joy Irrit. / Anger Sadness Anx. /

FearConc. / Worry Guilt

-.194 -.047 .193 .104 -.111 -.057(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

-.013 -.298 .371 .211 .153 -.079(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.006 -.297 .379 .229 .155 -.077(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

-.010 -.293 .380 .227 .158 -.087(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

-.015 -.283 .373 .222 .147 -.076(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

Infant Anger/Distress

Table 5. F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers' Endorsement of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos

Infant Neutral

Inter-Stimulus Blanks

Infant Anger/Distress Video 2 r (N)

Mothers’ Endorsed (Yes/No) Emotion:

8 min. Baseline

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F8/F7) During Video Display

Infant Joy

Inter-Stimulus Blanks

Infant Joy

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Neutral

Infant Anger/Distress Video 1 r (N)

Mothers’ Endorsed (Yes/No) Emotion:EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F8/F7) During Video Display

8 min. Baseline

125

Joy Irrit. / Anger Sadness Anx. /

FearConc. / Worry Guilt

-.272 .096 -.142 -.021 .039 -.073 .126(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (26)

.026 -.325 -.119 -.027 -.377 -.389 -.194(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (26)

.035 -.366 -.171 -.054 -.419 -.376 -.229(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (26)

.055 -.287 -.106 -.049 -.348 -.279 -.193(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (26)

.033 -.297 -.094 -.022 -.355 -.336 -.171(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (26)

-.216 .067 -.257(27) (22) (26)

-.210 .113 -.589**(27) (22) (26)

-.196 .116 -.592**(27) (22) (26)

-.181 .138 -.608**(27) (22) (26)

-.230 .125 -.601**(27) (22) (26)

-.470*(36)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

-.191(26)

-.423*(26)

-.450*(26)

-.475*(26)

Table 6. F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos

8 min. Baseline

Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Infants'

Emotion

Infant Anger/Distress Videos r (N)

Mothers’ Rating of Intensity of Emotion After Viewing:

8 min. Baseline

Infant Joy

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F4/F3) During Video Display

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F4/F3) During Video Display

Inter-Stimulus Blanks

Infant Joy

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Neutral

Inter-Stimulus Blanks

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Neutral

Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Infants'

Emotion

Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Infants'

Emotion

Infant Joy Videos r (N)

Infant Neutral Video r (N)

Mothers' Joy

Mothers' Joy

126

Joy Irrit. / Anger Sadness Anx. /

FearConc. / Worry Guilt

-.324 .090 .030 .053 .082 .077 -.169(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (27)

-.420 .636 -.098 -.197 -.018 -.338 .056(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (27)

-.396 .635 -.114 -.200 -.029 -.328 .063(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (27)

-.375 .646 -.099 -.200 -.015 -.329 .059(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (2)

-.402 .633 -.090 -.188 -.013 -.314 .050(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (27)

-.169 .080 -.313(27) (22) (26)

.056 -.121 -.267(27) (22) (26)

.063 -.135 -.251(27) (22) (26)

.059 -.126 -.278(27) (22) (26)

.050 -.129 -.267(27) (22) (26)

-.046(26)

-.333(26)

-.033(26)

-.030(26)

-.055(26)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Neutral

8 min. Baseline

Infant Joy

Infant Neutral

Inter-Stimulus Blanks

Infant Joy

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Joy Videos r (N)

Infant Neutral Video r (N)

Mothers' Joy

Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Infants'

Emotion

Mothers' Joy

Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Infants'

Emotion

8 min. Baseline

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F8/F7) During Video Display

Inter-Stimulus Blanks

Table 7. F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F4/F3) During Video Display

Infant Anger/Distress Videos r (N)

Mothers’ Rating of Intensity of Emotion After Viewing: Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Infants'

Emotion

127

Infant Neutral Video r (N)

Endorsed Emotion:

Joy Irrit. / Anger Sadness Anx. /

FearConc. / Worry Guilt Joy

.345 -.433* -.102 -.395* -.165 -.354 -.106(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.410* -.448* -.101 -.358 -.211 -.380 -.015(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.390* -.399* -.097 -.375 -.175 -.385* -.030(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

Joy Irrit. / Anger Sadness Anx. /

FearConc. / Worry Guilt

.027 -.109 -.047 .15 -.113 .038(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.107 -.122 -.082 .170 -.131 .028(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.055 -.086 -.057 .179 -.124 .018(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

Mothers’ Endorsed (Yes/No) Emotion:

Infant Anger/Distress Video 2 r (N)

Mothers’ Endorsed (Yes/No) Emotion:

Infant Anger/Distress Video 1 r (N)

Table 8. F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers' Endorsement of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos - After Subtracting Asymmetry from Baseline

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Neutral

Infant Joy

Infant Joy

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F4/F3) During Video Display (Subtracting Baseline)

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F4/F3) During Video Display (Subtracting Baseline)

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Neutral

128

Infant Neutral Video r (N)

Endorsed Emotion:

Joy Irrit. / Anger Sadness Anx. /

FearConc. / Worry Guilt Joy

.255 -.212 .081 -.087 .047 -.263 -.053(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.276 -.200 .081 -.076 .032 -.258 -.056(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.270 -.199 .076 -.086 .046 -.269 -.050(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

Joy Irrit. / Anger Sadness Anx. /

FearConc. / Worry Guilt

.116 -.276 .254 .149 .232 -.043(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.135 -.270 .256 .163 .231 -.040(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.119 -.272 .265 .166 .238 -.052(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

Infant Anger/Distress Video 1 r (N)

Mothers’ Endorsed (Yes/No) Emotion:EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F8/F7) During Video Display (Subtracting Baseline)

Infant Joy

Infant Neutral

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F8/F7) During Video Display (Subtracting Baseline)

Infant Joy

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Anger/Distress

Table 9. F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers' Endorsement of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos - After Subtracting Asymmetry from Baseline

Infant Neutral

Infant Anger/Distress Video 2 r (N)

Mothers’ Endorsed (Yes/No) Emotion:

129

Infant Neutral Video r (N)

Endorsed Emotion:

Joy Irrit. / Anger Sadness Anx. /

FearConc. / Worry Guilt Joy

.081 -.375 .112 -.249 .151 .396* .265(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.488** -.445* .098 .008 -.165 .155 .226(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.441* -.131 .186 -.077 .103 .238 .194(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

Joy Irrit. / Anger Sadness Anx. /

FearConc. / Worry Guilt

-.042 -.338 .243 -.136 .199 .056(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.468* -.365 -.015 .012 .051 -.015(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.185 -.186 .205 .066 .151 -.110(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

Infant Joy

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F4/F3) During Video Display (Subtracting Inter-Stimulus Blanks)

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F4/F3) During Video Display (Subtracting Inter-Stimulus Blanks)

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Neutral

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Neutral

Infant Joy

Infant Anger/Distress Video 1 r (N)

Table 10. F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers' Endorsement of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos - After Subtracting Asymmetry from Inter-Stimulus Blanks

Mothers’ Endorsed (Yes/No) Emotion:

Infant Anger/Distress Video 2 r (N)

Mothers’ Endorsed (Yes/No) Emotion:

130

Infant Neutral Video r (N)

Endorsed Emotion:

Joy Irrit. / Anger Sadness Anx. /

FearConc. / Worry Guilt Joy

.056 -.507** .081 -.236 .173 .162 .223(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.448* -.144 .062 .034 -.154 .209 .107(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.312 -.110 -.031 -.162 .102 .030 .221(27) (26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

Joy Irrit. / Anger Sadness Anx. /

FearConc. / Worry Guilt

.050 -.464* .001 -.269 .181 -.084(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.393* -.227 .053 .092 .129 -.014(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.089 -.237 .197 .120 .249 -.238(27) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

Infant Anger/Distress

Table 11. F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers' Endorsement of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos - After Subtracting Asymmetry from Inter-Stimulus Blanks

Infant Neutral

Infant Anger/Distress Video 2 r (N)

Mothers’ Endorsed (Yes/No) Emotion:

Infant Neutral

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F8/F7) During Video Display (Subtracting Inter-Stimulus Blanks)

Infant Joy

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Anger/Distress Video 1 r (N)

Mothers’ Endorsed (Yes/No) Emotion:EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F8/F7) During Video Display (Subtracting Inter-Stimulus Blanks)

Infant Joy

131

Joy Irrit. / Anger Sadness Anx. /

FearConc. / Worry Guilt

.491 -.342 .007 -.015 -.419 -.394 -.351(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (26)

.476 -.384 -.041 -.047 -.450 -.377 -.379(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (26)

.532 -.306 .025 -.041 -.403 -.382 -.350(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (26)

-.016 .062 -.403*(27) (22) (26)

.007 .059 -.382(26) (22) (26)

.020 .090 -.421*(27) (22) (26)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

-.283(26)

-.295(26)

-.339(26)

Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Infants'

Emotion

Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Infants'

Emotion

Infant Joy Videos r (N)

Infant Neutral Video r (N)

Mothers' Joy

Mothers' Joy

Infant Joy

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F4/F3) During Video Display (Subtracting Baseline)

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Neutral

Infant Neutral

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Joy

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F4/F3) During Video Display (Subtracting Baseline)

Table 12. F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos - After Subtracting Asymmetry from Baseline

Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Infants'

Emotion

Infant Anger/Distress Videos r (N)

Mothers’ Rating of Intensity of Emotion After Viewing:

132

Joy Irrit. / Anger Sadness Anx. /

FearConc. / Worry Guilt

-.109 .429 -.122 -.219 -.065 -.353 -.046(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (26)

-.059 .422 -.137 -.221 -.075 -.342 -.043(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (26)

-.079 .438 -.124 -.223 -.061 -.346 -.046(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (26)

.170 -.178 -.069(27) (22) (26)

.176 -.190 -.050(27) (22) (26)

.174 -.183 -.081(27) (22) (26)

.190(26)

.164(26)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

.187(26)

Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Infants'

Emotion

Mothers' Joy

Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Infants'

Emotion

Infant Neutral Video r (N)

Infant Joy

Table 13. F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos - After Subtracting Asymmetry from Baseline

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F8/F7) During Video Display (Subtracting Baseline)

Infant Anger/Distress Videos r (N)

Mothers’ Rating of Intensity of Emotion After Viewing:

Infant Neutral

Infant Anger/Distress

Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Infants'

Emotion

Infant Neutral

Infant Joy

Infant Anger/Distress

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F8/F7) During Video Display (Subtracting Baseline)

Infant Joy Videos r (N)

Mothers' Joy

133

Joy Irrit. / Anger Sadness Anx. /

FearConc. / Worry Guilt

-.072 -.518 -.244 -.074 -.379 -.579 -.240(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (26)

-.002 -.561 -.530 -.503 -.488* -.572 -.391*(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (26)

.217 .431 -.148 -.296 -.048 -.511 -.236(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (26)

.112 -.067 -.032(27) (22) (26)

.235 -.070 .087(27) (22) (26)

.434* .153 -.150(27) (22) (26)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

.303(26)

.157(26)

-.112(26)

Table 14. F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos - After Subtracting Asymmetry from Inter-Stimulus Blanks

Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Infants'

Emotion

Infant Anger/Distress Videos r (N)

Mothers’ Rating of Intensity of Emotion After Viewing:

Infant Neutral

Infant Neutral

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Joy

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F4/F3) During Video Display (Subtracting Inter-Stimulus Blanks)

Infant Joy

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F4/F3) During Video Display (Subtracting Inter-Stimulus Blanks)

Infant Anger/Distress

Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Infants'

Emotion

Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Infants'

Emotion

Infant Joy Videos r (N)

Infant Neutral Video r (N)

Mothers' Joy

Mothers' Joy

134

Joy Irrit. / Anger Sadness Anx. /

FearConc. / Worry Guilt

-.405 .279 -.221 -.352 -.196 -.632 -.323(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (26)

.288 -.202 -.430 -.426 -.349 -.332 -.162(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (26)

.096 .643 -.239 -.282 -.058 -.348 -.215(6) (7) (21) (12) (18) (9) (26)

.169 .197 -.042(27) (22) (26)

.239 -.107 .345(27) (22) (26)

.190 .042 -.259(27) (22) (26)

.314(26)

-.201(26)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

.357(26)

Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Infants'

Emotion

Infant Neutral

Infant Joy

Infant Anger/Distress

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F8/F7) During Video Display (Subtracting Inter-Stimulus Blanks)

Infant Joy Videos r (N)

Mothers' Joy

Infant Neutral

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Joy

Table 15. F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Emotions Experienced in Response to Infant Emotion Videos - After Subtracting Asymmetry from Inter-Stimulus Blanks

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F8/F7) During Video Display (Subtracting Inter-Stimulus Blanks)

Infant Anger/Distress Videos r (N)

Mothers’ Rating of Intensity of Emotion After Viewing: Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Infants'

Emotion

Mothers' Joy

Mothers' Rating of Intensity of Infants'

Emotion

Infant Neutral Video r (N)

135

-.429* -.091 -.187(27) (27) (27)

-.023 .110 -.179(27) (27) (27)

-.039 .078 -.184(27) (27) (27)

-.046 .092 -.189(27) (27) (27)

-.070 .109 -.206(27) (27) (27)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F4/F3) During Video Display

Anxiety T-Score

Depression T-Score

Infant Joy

Infant Anger/Distress

Table 16. F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers' Reported Anxious and Depressive Symptoms

SCL-90-R Subscales r (N) Total Lifetime

Months Depressed r (N)

8 min. Baseline

Infant Neutral

Inter-Stimulus Blanks

-.342 .099 -.278(27) (27) (27)

.112 .265 -.331(27) (27) (27)

.114 .251 -.323(27) (27) (27)

.098 .247 -.328(27) (27) (27)

.102 .264 -.326(27) (27) (27)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

Inter-Stimulus Blanks

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Neutral

Anxiety T-Score

Infant Joy

8 min. Baseline

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F8/F7) During Video Display

Table 17. F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers' Reported Anxious and Depressive Symptoms

Total Lifetime Months Depressed

r (N)Depression T-Score

SCL-90-R Subscales r (N)

136

.414* .218 -.145(27) (27) (27)

.395* .177 -.169(27) (27) (27)

.393* .198 -.173(27) (27) (27)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

Infant Neutral

Infant Joy

Infant Anger/Distress

Depression T-Score

Table 18. F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers' Reported Anxious and Depressive Symptoms - After Subtracting Asymmetry from Baseline

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F4/F3) During Video Display (Subtracting Baseline)

SCL-90-R Subscales r (N) Total Lifetime

Months Depressed r (N)Anxiety

T-Score

.344 .206 -.155(27) (27) (27)

.344 .189 -.143(27) (27) (27)

.331 .190 -.153(27) (27) (27)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

Infant Joy

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Neutral

Table 19. F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers' Reported Anxious and Depressive Symptoms - After Subtracting Asymmetry from Baseline

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F8/F7) During Video Display (Subtracting Baseline)

SCL-90-R Subscales r (N) Total Lifetime

Months Depressed r (N)Anxiety

T-ScoreDepression

T-Score

137

.381* .030 .179(27) (27) (27)

.217 -.217 .153(27) (27) (27)

.225 -.153 .134(27) (27) (27)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

Infant Neutral

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F4/F3) During Video Display (Subtracting Inter-Stimulus Blanks)

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Joy

Table 20. F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers' Reported Anxious and Depressive Symptoms - After Subtracting Asymmetry from Inter-Stimulus Blanks

SCL-90-R Subscales r (N) Total Lifetime

Months Depressed r (N)Anxiety

T-ScoreDepression

T-Score

.289 .059 -.163(27) (27) (27)

.218 -.283 .110(27) (27) (27)

-.074 -.298 -.067(27) (27) (27)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Neutral

Depression T-Score

Infant Joy

Table 21. F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Mothers' Reported Anxious and Depressive Symptoms - After Subtracting Asymmetry from Inter-Stimulus Blanks

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F8/F7) During Video Display (Subtracting Inter-Stimulus Blanks)

SCL-90-R Subscales r (N) Total Lifetime

Months Depressed r (N)Anxiety

T-Score

138

.063 -.006 -.296 .135 .087 .090(26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.041 -.033 -.249 .035 .010 .010(26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.080 -.046 -.225 .028 .037 .037(26) (27) (7) (27) (27) (27)

.099 .010 -.235 .055 .048 .048(26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

-.018 .025 -.208 .087 .036 .036(26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Neutral

8 min. Baseline

Infant Joy

Table 22. F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Observed Emotional Availability

Emotional Availability ScalesEEG Alpha Asymmetry (F4/F3) During Video Display

Sensitivity Structuring Non-Intrusiveness

Non- Hostility

Child Responsive

Child Involvement

Inter-Stimulus Blanks

* p < .05 ** p < .01

.040 -.012 -.330 .083 .042 .046(26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.325 .278 .207 .392* .265 .183(26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.316 .268 .212 .383* .263 .182(26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.327 .284 .197 .386* .273 .196(26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.330 .284 .209 .395* .265 .182(26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

Table 23. F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Observed Emotional Availability

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F8/F7) During Video Display

Emotional Availability Scales

Sensitivity Structuring Non-Intrusiveness

Non- Hostility

Child Responsive

Child Involvement

8 min. Baseline

Infant Joy

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Neutral

Inter-Stimulus Blanks

139

-.018 -.031 .021 -.099 -.077 -.081(26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

-.020 -.044 .057 -.107 -.063 -.052(26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.026 .017 .041 -.078 -.036 -.040(26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

Table 24. F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Observed Emotional Availability - After Subtracting Asymmetry from Baseline

Emotional Availability Scales

Sensitivity Structuring Non-Intrusiveness

Non- Hostility

Child Responsive

Child Involvement

Infant Joy

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Neutral

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F4/F3) During Video Display (Subtracting Baseline)

.309 .295 .434* .349 .245 .158(26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.296 .280 .436* .335 .240 .154(26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

.314 .302 .425* .345 .255 .172(26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

Child Responsive

Child Involvement

Table 25. F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Observed Emotional Availability - After Subtracting Asymmetry from Baseline

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F8/F7) During Video Display (Subtracting Baseline)

Emotional Availability Scales

Sensitivity Structuring Non-Intrusiveness

Non- Hostility

Infant Neutral

Infant Joy

Infant Anger/Distress

140

-.473* -.473* -.397* -.416* -.167 -.208(26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

-.435* -.480* -.110 -.403* -.060 .001(26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

-.165 -.137 -.298 -.301 .159 .117(26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

Table 26. F4/F3 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Observed Emotional Availability - After Subtracting Asymmetry from Inter-Stimulus Blanks

Emotional Availability Scales

Sensitivity Structuring Non-Intrusiveness

Non- Hostility

Child Responsive

Child Involvement

Infant Joy

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Neutral

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F4/F3) During Video Display (Subtracting Inter-Stimulus Blanks)

-.099 -.127 -.014 -.023 .041 .054(26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

-.321 -.358 .027 -.282 -.063 -.027(26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

-.016 .029 -.227 -.131 .206 .311(26) (27) (27) (27) (27) (27)

* p < .05 ** p < .01

Table 27. F8/F7 Frontal EEG Alpha Asymmetry During Infant Videos and Observed Emotional Availability - After Subtracting Asymmetry from Inter-Stimulus Blanks

EEG Alpha Asymmetry (F8/F7) During Video Display (Subtracting Inter-Stimulus Blanks)

Emotional Availability Scales

Sensitivity Structuring Non-Intrusiveness

Non- Hostility

Child Responsive

Child Involvement

Infant Joy

Infant Anger/Distress

Infant Neutral

141

Table 28. Summary of Study Findings for Baseline Condition

MOTHER-REPORTED EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCES TO INFANT VIDEOS

· No significant findingsMOTHERS’ ANXIOUS & DEPRESSIVE SYMPTOMS

· Greater anxietyMATERNAL EMOTIONAL AVAILABILITY

· No significant findings

Greater Relative Right Frontal Activation During 8-MINUTE BASELINE

was associated with:

142

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· G

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fant

neu

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vid

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· Lo

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of “

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to in

fant

joy

vide

o

· N

ot e

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sadn

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o in

fant

ang

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ess v

ideo

· N

o si

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find

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· Le

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(gre

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No

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Dur

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Tabl

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Fin

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r In

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Em

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Rel

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Dur

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Gre

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Rel

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Dur

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OY

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· Lo

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MO

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143

Figure 1. HydroCel Geodesic Sensor Net 128 Channel Map with Electrode Clusters Corresponding to F3, F4, F7, and F8 of the International 10-20 System.

VITA LAUREN A. KILLEEN

EDUCATION Ph.D., Clinical Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University (Aug 2010) M.S., Clinical Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University (May 2006) B.A., Psychology, Northwestern University (June 2002) GRADUATE EXPERIENCE Research Research Coordinator, The Minds of Mothers Study (MOMS) (Jan 2006 – June 2008) Research Assistant, Parenting at Risk Initiative, Child Study Center (Sept 2003 – Dec 2006) Research Assistant, Collaborative Family Study (Sept 2003 – Dec 2004) Clinical Predoctoral Intern in Pediatric Psychology, Rush University Medical Center (July 2009 – June 2010) Neuropsychology Technician, Neuropsychology Partners, Inc. (July 2008 – May 2009) Staff Therapist, Pennsylvania State University Psychological Clinic (Jan 2004 – May 2008) Teaching Graduate Course Instructor, Abnormal Psychology (Aug 2006 – Dec 2006) Graduate Lab Instructor, Basic Research Methods in Psychology (Jan – May 2006 & 2007) SELECTED PUBLICATIONS Teti, D. M., Killeen, L. A., Candelaria, M., Miller, W., Hess, C. R., & Melissa O’Connell, M. (2008). Adult attachment, parental commitment to early intervention, and developmental outcomes in an African American sample at double jeopardy. In H. Steel & M. Steele (Eds.), Clinical Applications of the Adult Attachment Interview (pp. 126-153). New York: The Guilford Press. Killeen, L. A., Lopez-Zafra, E., & Eagly, A. E. (2006). Envisioning oneself as a leader: Comparisons of women and men in Spain and the United States. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 30(3), 312-322. Schweinsburg, A. D., Paulus, M., P., Barlett, V. C., Killeen, L. A., Caldwell, L. C., Pulido, C., Brown, S. A., & Tapert, S. F. (2004). An fMRI study of response inhibition in youths with a family history of alcoholism. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1021, 391-394. SELECTED PRESENTATIONS Teti, D. M., Killeen, L. A., Hajal, N. J., Cole, Pamela A., Feinberg, M. E. (2010). Prefrontal cortical asymmetry in mothers to infant emotional events and emotional availability. Paper presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies (ICIS), Baltimore, MD, March 2010. Killeen, L. A., & Crnic, K. A. (2007). Across-parent associations between observed parenting behavior and reported marital quality: Child gender as moderator. Poster presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD). Boston, MA, April 2007. Killeen, L. A., Gaze, C. M., & Crnic, K. A. (2004). Marital quality in typically developing children and children with developmental delays. Poster presented at the Gatlinburg Conference, San Diego, CA, March 2004. HONORS & AWARDS International Philanthropic Educational Organization (PEO) Scholar Award, 2008 Liberal Arts Graduate Scholar, The Pennsylvania State University, 2003-2005