The temporal dimension in the understanding of maternal sensitivity in caregiver-infant interactions: The 'Early Mother-Child Interaction Coding System'

Instruments to measure interaction of mothers and newborns: A systematic review

Interactions between newborns and their parents/primary caregivers are characterized by asymmetric and dependent relationships. This systematic review mapped, identified, and described the psychometric parameters, categories, and items of instruments used to assess mother-newborn interaction. Seven electronic databases were accessed in this study. Furthermore, this research included neonatal interaction studies describing instruments' items, domains, and psychometric properties while excluding studies that focused on maternal interactions and lacked items for assessing newborns. Additionally, studies validated with older infants that did not have a newborn in the sample were used for test validation, which is a criterion used to decrease the risk of bias. Fourteen observational instruments from 1047 identified citations were included that addressed interactions using varying techniques, constructs, and settings. Particularly, we focused on observational settings that assessed interactions with communication-based constructs in the context of proximity or distance as influenced by physical, behavioral, or procedural barriers. These tools are also used to predict risk behaviors in a psychological context, mitigate feeding difficulties, and conduct neurobehavioral assessments of mother-newborn interactions. The elicited imitation was also an observational setting. This study found that the most described properties in the included citations were inter-rater reliability followed by criterion validity. However, only two instruments reported content, construct, and criterion validity, as well as a description of an internal consistency assessment and inter-rater reliability. Finally, the synthesis of the instruments reported in this study can guide clinicians and researchers in selecting the most appropriate one for their own application.

Multimodal Approach for Characterizing the Quality of Parent-Child Interaction: A Single Synchronization Source May Not Tell the Whole Story

The interaction between the parent and child is essential for the child's cognitive and emotional development and sets the path for future well-being. These interactions, starting from birth, are necessary for providing the sensory stimulation the child needs in the critical time window of brain development. The characterization of parent-child interactions is traditionally performed by human decoding. This approach is considered the leading and most accurate way of characterizing the quality of these interactions. However, the development of computational tools and especially the concept of parent-child synchronization opened up an additional source of data characterizing these interactions in an objective, less human-labor manner. Such sources include brain-to-brain, voice/speech, eye contact, motor, and heart-rate synchronization. However, can a single source synchronization dataset accurately represent parent-child interaction? Will attending to the same stimulation, often resulting in a higher brain-to-brain synchronization, be considered an interactive condition? In this perspective, we will try to convey a new concept of the child-parent interaction synchronization (CHIPS) matrix, which includes the different sources of signals generated during an interaction. Such a model may assist in explaining the source of interaction alterations in the case of child/parent developmental/emotional or sensory deficits and may open up new ways of assessing interventions and changes in parent-child interactions along development. We will discuss this interaction during one of the parent-child joint activities providing opportunities for interaction, i.e., storytelling.