- Title
- Here's looking at you, kid: relationships between mothers’ visual scanning, parental reflective functioning, emotional availability and child development
- Creator
- Jones, Christy
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2020
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- Abstract: The ability to detect and respond to infant facial affective cues is crucial in the way early parent-infant relationships develop. A small amount of research has linked infant cue processing with the quality of the mother-infant relationship (Pearson, Lightman, & Evans, 2011) and a mother’s capacity to reflect on her child’s emotions, feelings and behaviours (Rutherford, Maupin, Landi, Potenza, & Mayes, 2017). A series of studies sought to integrate the assessment of clinically relevant parenting capacities, namely, parental reflective functioning and emotional availability, with an objective psychophysiological measure of a mother’s visual processing of their infant’s affective cues. The findings reveal that mothers’ reflective functioning and emotional availability predicted patterns of visual scanning to their own infant’s face, even when differential visual processing of ‘own’ verses ‘unknown’ (control) infant faces was not observed. Understanding the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying infant cue processing is important for supporting healthy parent-infant relationships and child wellbeing, in so far as attending to infant cues is implicated not only in parental behaviours but in parental reflective capacities about their child’s emotions and behaviours.
- Subject
- mother-infant relationship; parental reflective functioning; mother-infant interactions; face processing; mentalization; emotional availability; child development; visual scanning; mother & infant; infant development; eye-tracking; postnatal depression; postnatal anxiety
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1418406
- Identifier
- uon:37345
- Rights
- Copyright 2020 Christy Jones
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 4 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 86 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |