Mama Tried: Contingent Responding to Distress Does Not Increase Rates of Real-time Soothing in Infants High in Negative Affect

Although maternal insensitivity, infant negative emotion expression, and maternal depression are consistently found to be associated, the processes by which these associations develop in the course of routine interactions are not well understood. To examine the processes by which these factors may become related, this paper characterizes the real-time sequences of mother and infant behaviors associated with infant soothing (or lack thereof) in mothers (n = 202) with a history of depression and their 3-month old infants. Analyses indicate that overall, maternal contingent responding to individual episodes of infant distress increases the likelihood of infant soothing in real-time. However, clustering analyses indicate that contingent responding does not significantly increase real-time soothing in infants who showed high negative affect expression.