Maternal Anxious Attachment Style is Associated with Reduced Mother-Child Brain-to-Brain Synchrony During Passive TV Viewing

Synchrony in developmental science reflects the coordination of mother and child to the same mental state. Mentalisation processes are influenced by individual attachment styles. A mother with an anxious-related attachment style tends to engage in emotional mentalisation that relies on her child’s social cues. During an everyday joint activity of watching television shows together, we hypothesised that anxiously-attached mothers are less able to match their mental state to characters in the shows as their attention is likely detracted from the show and directed towards the child. We predict that this mismatch in mother’s and child’s emotional states would be reflected in reduced dyadic brain-to-brain synchrony. To test this hypothesis, we profiled mothers’ Maternal Anxiety score using the Preoccupation and Need for Approval subscales of the Attachment Style Questionnaire (ASQ) and used functional Near-infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning with 33 mother-child dyads to measure prefrontal cortex (PFC) synchrony while the dyads watched three 1-min animation videos together. Greater Maternal Anxiety is associated with less synchrony in the medial right prefrontal cluster implicated in mentalisation processes. Anxiously-attached mothers appear to exhibit less brain-to-brain synchrony with their child which suggests differences in intersubjective shared experiences that potentially undermines the quality of bonding during everyday joint activities.