Current maternal depression associated with worsened children's social outcomes during middle childhood: Exploring the role of positive affect socialization

BACKGROUND

Maternal depression negatively predicts aspects of the mother-child relationship and social functioning in offspring. This study evaluated interrelations between mothers' depression history and current severity with dynamic indices of positive affect socialization and indices of offspring' social outcomes.

METHODS

N = 66 mother-child dyads in which approximately 50 % of mothers had a history of maternal depression were recruited. Children were 6-8 years old and 47.7 % male. Dyads completed a positive interaction task, which was coded for mother and child positive affect. Mothers and children reported on peer functioning and social problems and children reported on the quality of their best friendships at 1-year follow-up.

RESULTS

Current level of maternal depression, but not depression history, was related to more social problems and lower best friend relationship quality. Indices of positive affect socialization were not related to history or current levels of maternal depression, or social outcomes, with the exception of maternal depression history predicting greater likelihood of mothers joining their children in expressing positive affect. Exploratory, supplementary analysis revealed that this may be due to treatment history among these mothers.

LIMITATIONS

Conclusions should be tempered by the small sample size, which limited the types of analyses that were conducted.

CONCLUSION

Results suggest that the effect of maternal depression on aspects of child social outcomes could be specific to current levels. Our data also did not support previously found associations between maternal depression and positive affect socialization. Results suggest positive implications for the effect of treatment for maternal depression for mother-child dynamics.

Association Between Children's Empathy and Depression: The Moderating Role of Social Preference

Although empathy is typically an adaptive characteristic of children, extreme empathy alone or in combination with a negative environment may contribute to a risk of depression. The present study comprehensively investigated the associations between the three constructs of empathy and depression in children, as well as the potential moderating effect of peer relationships (i.e., social preference) on this association. A total of 1223 children (mean age = 10.50 ± .93 years) completed questionnaires on empathy and depression, and social preference was nominated by their peers. Cognitive empathy and positive empathy exerted a positive quadratic effect on depression, while negative empathy had a positive linear association with depression. For children with a low social preference, all three empathy constructs were positively quadratically correlated with depression, extremely high and low empathy were associated with increased depression, and moderate empathy was associated with the lowest level of depression. For children with a high social preference, higher positive empathy was associated with lower depression.

Theory of Mind in Pre-school Aged Children: Influence of Maternal Depression and Infants' Self-Comforting Behavior

A milestone of child development is theory of mind (ToM): the ability to attribute mental states, especially beliefs and desires, to other persons and to understand that their behavior is guided by mental states. The learning process about the mental world also takes place in social communication and interaction, beginning in infancy. Infancy is assumed to be a sensitive period for the development of social skills through interaction. Due to limited self-regulatory skills, infants depend on sensitive behavior of their caregivers to regulate affective states and physiological arousal, and in turn, mutually regulated affects allow the infant to gradually acquire the capability to self-regulate negative affective states. Effective and adequate affect regulation is an important prerequisite for environmental interaction and thus for the development of socio-emotional skills. The present study investigated the relation of self-regulatory abilities in infancy and later ToM in pre-school aged children of clinically depressed mothers and healthy controls. The sample comprised of N = 55 mother-child dyads, n = 22 diagnosed with postpartum or lifetime depression according to DSM-IV and n = 33 healthy controls. Mother-infant-interaction was videotaped during the Face-to-Face Still-Face paradigm. At 3 and 42 months postpartum mothers were interviewed with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorders (SCID-I) to evaluate maternal psychopathological status according to DSM-IV. At the age of M = 4.0 years, children's ToM abilities were assessed using content-false-belief and location-false-belief tasks. The results of this study show that contrary to our hypotheses, maternal depression did not impair the development of children's ToM-abilities per se. Rather, an interaction effect highlights the role of infant's self-comforting behavior during mother-infant interaction in infancy (3 months postpartum) for ToM-development at pre-school age assessed with the Maxi-task; this association was distinct for female in comparison to male children. The results of this longitudinal study shed light on the discussion, how maternal depression influences child development and point in the direction that self-comforting behaviors in infancy can also be seen as a resource.