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Postpartum depression (PPD) affects up to one in five and negatively affects mothers, birthing parents, and their infants. The impact of PPD exposure on infant emotion regulation (ER) may be particularly harmful given its associations with later psychiatric problems. It remains unclear if treating maternal PPD can improve infant ER. To examine the impact of a nine-week peer-delivered group cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) intervention on infant ER assessed across physiological and behavioral levels. Seventy-three mother-infant dyads were enrolled in a randomized controlled trial from 2018 to 2020. Mothers/birthing parents were randomized to the experimental group or waitlist control group. Measures of infant ER were collected at baseline (T1) and nine weeks later (T2). Infant ER was assessed using two physiological measures (frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) and High Frequency-Heart Rate Variability (HF-HRV)), and parental-report of infant temperament. Experimental group infants displayed more adaptive changes in both physiological markers of infant ER from T1 to T2 (FAA (F(1,56) = 4.16, p =.046) and HF-HRV (F(1,28.1) = 5.57, p =.03)) than those in the waitlist control group. Despite improvements in maternal PPD, no differences were noted in infant temperament from T1 to T2. A limited sample size, potential lack of generalizability of our results to other populations, and an absence of long-term data collection. A scalable intervention designed for those with PPD may be capable of adaptively improving infant ER. Replication in larger samples is needed to determine if maternal treatment can help disrupt the transmission of psychiatric risk from mothers/birthing parents to their infants. • Mothers were treated with a nine-week peer-delivered group cognitive behavioral therapy intervention. • Maternal treatment led to adaptive changes in two neurophysiological markers of infant emotion regulation. • A scalable, task-shifted maternal intervention may be capable of adaptively improving infant ER. • Maternal treatment may disrupt the transmission of psychiatric risk from mothers/birthing parents to their infants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Exposure to maternal postpartum depression (PPD) increases the risk for emotion regulatory and psychiatric problems in offspring. This study aimed to determine if maternal cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for PPD improves infant emotion regulatory capacity. Methods: Participants were 40 infants of mothers with a primary diagnosis of major depressive disorder matched 1:1-40 healthy control infants of nondepressed mothers on infant age, sex, and socioeconomic status. Mothers with PPD received nine weeks of group CBT. Dyads were tested at two time points. Visit 1 occurred following the first CBT session (baseline visit for control infants). Visit 2 took place after CBT (nine weeks post-baseline for controls). At both visits, infant emotion regulation was assessed using resting-state frontal electroencephalography alpha asymmetry (FAA), heart rate variability (HRV), and maternal and partner ratings of orientation or regulation behaviors (infant behavior questionnaire-revised [short form]). Changes in maternal characteristics (depression, bonding, and emotion regulation) from pretreatment to posttreatment were examined to determine if they explained infant changes. Results: At Visit 1, infants of women with PPD exhibited poorer emotion regulation relative to the healthy control infants. At Visit 2, following maternal PPD treatment, infants exhibited improved emotion regulation (shifted from right to left FAA [p = .01, d = 0.60], increased HRV [p = .003, d = 0.56], mother [p = .015, d = 0.29] and partner [p = .049, d = 0.35] reported orientation or regulation behaviors) such that they no longer differed from the healthy control infants. Changes in maternal characteristics did not appear to account for these changes. Conclusion: Treating PPD may promote adaptive changes in physiological and behavioral systems underlying infant emotion regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This study examined the impact of treating postpartum depression (PPD) with cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) on mother and infant behavior on the face-to-face still-face (FFSF) paradigm.Methods: Data from 68 mothers and their infants, 35 women with PPD within 12 months of delivery, and 33 healthy control dyads matched on infant age, sex and familial socioeconomic status were examined. Women with PPD received nine weeks of group CBT and were compared with healthy control dyads with at three timepoints on changes in mother-infant performance on the FFSF.Results: A significant group x FFSF phase x visit interaction was observed for infant withdrawn behavior at the three months post-treatment (p=0.006). Infants of mothers with PPD displayed significantly less withdrawn behavior after treatment, normalizing to levels of control infants.Limitations: A relatively small sample consisting predominantly of Caucasian mother-infant dyads and the presence of comorbid anxiety in the PPD group.Conclusion: Three months after group CBT for PPD, infants' withdrawn behavior appears to normalize to levels seen in the infants of healthy controls. Future studies should investigate whether treatments focused on the mother-infant dyad have distinctive effects on mothers and their infants' behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Face-to-Face Still-Face (FFSF) task is a validated and commonly used observational measure of mother-infant socio-emotional interactions. With the ascendence of deep learning-based facial emotion recognition, it is possible that common complex tasks, such as the coding of FFSF videos, could be coded with a high degree of accuracy by deep neural networks (DNNs). The primary objective of this study was to test the accuracy of four DNN image classification models against the coding of infant engagement conducted by two trained independent manual raters. 68 mother-infant dyads completed the FFSF task at three timepoints. Two trained independent raters undertook second-by-second manual coding of infant engagement into one of four classes: 1) positive affect, 2) neutral affect, 3) object/environment engagement, and 4) negative affect. Training four different DNN models on 40,000 images, we achieved a maximum accuracy of 99.5% on image classification of infant frames taken from recordings of the FFSF task with a maximum inter-rater reliability (Cohen's κ-value) of 0.993. This study inherits all sampling and experimental limitations of the original study from which the data was taken, namely a relatively small and primarily White sample. Based on the extremely high classification accuracy, these findings suggest that DNNs could be used to code infant engagement in FFSF recordings. DNN image classification models may also have the potential to improve the efficiency of coding all observational tasks with applications across multiple fields of human behavior research. • The FFSF Task aims to assess critical information on mother-infant interaction patterns. • DNNs can accurately codify infant behavior in the context of the FFSF Task. • DNNs have the potential to improve the efficiency of coding commonly used observational tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]