Effects of maternal depression on maternal responsiveness and infants' expressive language abilities

Ruth Brookman; Marina Kalashnikova; Penny Levickis; Janet Conti; Nan Xu Rattanasone; Kerry-Ann Grant; Katherine Demuth; Denis Burnham

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0277762

Effects of maternal depression on maternal responsiveness and infants' expressive language abilities

PLoS One. 2023 Jan 11;18(1):e0277762. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0277762. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Ruth Brookman^{1

2}, Marina Kalashnikova^{1

3

4}, Penny Levickis⁵, Janet Conti², Nan Xu Rattanasone⁶, Kerry-Ann Grant⁷, Katherine Demuth⁶, Denis Burnham¹

Affiliations

¹ The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia.
² School of Psychology, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia.
³ BCBL, Basque Center for Cognition, Brain and Language, San Sebastian, Spain.
⁴ IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain.
⁵ Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
⁶ Child Language Lab, Centre for Language Studies, Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Macquarie Park, NSW, Australia.
⁷ Health Education and Training Institute, Parramatta BC, NSW, Australia.

Abstract

High levels of maternal responsiveness are associated with healthy cognitive and emotional development in infants. However, depression and anxiety can negatively impact individual mothers' responsiveness levels and infants' expressive language abilities. Australian mother-infant dyads (N = 48) participated in a longitudinal study examining the effect of maternal responsiveness (when infants were 9- and 12-months), and maternal depression and anxiety symptoms on infant vocabulary size at 18-months. Global maternal responsiveness ratings were stronger predictors of infants' vocabulary size than levels of depression and anxiety symptoms. However, depression levels moderated the effect of maternal responsiveness on vocabulary size. These results highlight the importance of screening for maternal responsiveness-in addition to depression-to identify infants who may be at developmental risk. Also, mothers with elevated depression need support to first reduce their symptoms so that improvements in their responsiveness have the potential to be protective for their infant's language acquisition.

Copyright: © 2023 Brookman et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Australia
Cognition
Depression* / psychology
Female
Humans
Infant
Language
Longitudinal Studies
Mother-Child Relations* / psychology
Mothers / psychology

Grants and funding

This research was supported, in part, by an Australian Postgraduate Award PhD scholarship, the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and a Development Writing Fellowship to the first author, as well as the ARC grant # FL130100014 to the seventh author. The second author’s work is supported by the Basque Government through the BERC 2018–2021 program and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the Ramon y Cajal Research Fellowship, PID2019-105528GA-I00.