Does mothers' postnatal depression influence the development of imitation?

Oliver Perra,Rhiannon Fyfield,Rebecca Phillips,Cerith Waters,Dale F Hay

doi:10.1111/jcpp.12413

Abstract

BackgroundLinks between mothers’ postnatal depression (PND) and children's cognition have been identified in several samples, but the evidence is inconsistent. We hypothesized that PND may specifically interfere with infants’ imitation, an early learning ability that features in early mother–infant interaction and is linked to memory, causal understanding and joint attention.MethodsA randomly controlled experiment on imitation was embedded into a longitudinal study of a representative sample of firstborn British infants, whose mothers were assessed for depression using the SCAN interview during pregnancy and at 6 months postpartum. At a mean of 12.8 months, 253 infants were presented with two imitation tasks that varied in difficulty, in counterbalanced order.ResultsThe infants of mothers who experienced PND were significantly less likely than other infants in the sample to imitate the modelled actions, showing a 72% reduction in the likelihood of imitation. The association with PND was not explained by sociodemographic adversity, or a history of depression during pregnancy or prior to conception. Mothers’ references to infants’ internal states during mother–infant interaction at 6 months facilitated imitation at 12 months, but did not explain the link with PND.ConclusionsThe findings support the hypothesis that associations between PND and later cognitive outcomes may partly derive from effects of the mother's illness on infants’ early learning abilities. Support for infants’ learning should be considered as an age‐appropriate, child‐focused component of interventions designed to ameliorate the effects of PND.

Highlights

In a longitudinal case-comparison study of families drawn from a population cohort in Cambridgeshire, postnatal depression (PND) was associated with problems in sensorimotor skills in infancy (Murray, 1992) but not IQ scores in middle childhood (Murray, Hipwell, Hooper, Stein, & Cooper, 1996); a sleeper effect emerged, with the adolescent offspring of mothers with PND less likely to do well on national achievement examinations (Murray et al, 2010)
We focus on imitation, a learning ability that develops in infancy (Carpenter, Nagell, Tomasello, Butterworth, & Moore, 1998; Jones, 2009) and is associated with other cognitive skills such as memory (Hayne, Boniface, & Barr, 2000; Rose, Feldman, Jankowski, & van Rossem, 2011), causal understanding (Kiraly, Csibra, & Gergely, 2013) and joint attention (Carpenter, Nagell et al, 1998)
The Cardiff Child Development Study (CCDS) was approved by the UK National Health Service (NHS) Multi-Centre Research Ethics Committee; 332 first-time mothers were recruited from antenatal clinics in two NHS Healthcare Trusts in Wales and through a specialized midwifery team designed to support pregnant women at high social risk

Summary

Introduction

Links between mothers’ postnatal depression (PND) and children’s cognition have been identified in several studies where mothers were diagnosed using clinical interviews and children tested on age-appropriate tasks (e.g. Azak, 2012; Cogill, Caplan, Alexandra, Robson, & Kumar, 1986; Galler, Harrison, Ramsey, Forde, & Butler, 2000; Hay, Pawlby, Waters, & Sharp, 2008; Hay et al, 2001; Murray, 1992; Murray, Kempton, Woolgar, & Hooper, 1993; Sharp et al, 1995). Links between mothers’ postnatal depression (PND) and children’s cognition have been identified in several studies where mothers were diagnosed using clinical interviews and children tested on age-appropriate tasks Links between mothers’ postnatal depression (PND) and children’s cognition have been identified in several samples, but the evidence is inconsistent. Methods: A randomly controlled experiment on imitation was embedded into a longitudinal study of a representative sample of firstborn British infants, whose mothers were assessed for depression using the SCAN interview during pregnancy and at 6 months postpartum. Mothers’ references to infants’ internal states during mother–infant interaction at 6 months facilitated imitation at 12 months, but did not explain the link with PND. Conclusions: The findings support the hypothesis that associations between PND and later cognitive outcomes may partly derive from effects of the mother’s illness on infants’ early learning abilities.

Methods

Results

Conclusion