Hidden Regulators Within the Mother–Infant Interaction

Abstract

Our work that led to the understanding of hidden regulators within the mother-infant interaction has its roots in the mid-1950s, when the customary childbirth practices were to anesthetize the mother fully as soon as labor pains began, and to continue throughout birth. Then, mothers and babies were kept (separately) in the hospital for a week with daily short visits between the two, while the mother became accustomed to the strange "bag of reflexes" that newborns were thought to be, and learned to manage the sterilization procedures for the bottle feedings when finally the time came to go home. But "natural childbirth" was beginning to be imported from Britain and T. Berry Brazelton and a very few developmental psychologists around the country were beginning to discover what newborns (and mothers) could do if studied under natural conditions rather than in the laboratory or a clinical setting. However, natural childbirth was actually part of a more general "enlightenment" making slow progress throughout medicine and embodied in the new field of psychosomatic medicine. Related work on animal models in the 1960s, including the extraordinary impact of Harry Harlow's maternal deprivation studies in monkeys, led to an interest in learning more about the behavior and biology of the early mother-infant relationship.

Technologically-assisted communication attenuates inter-brain synchrony

“…The frontal cortex is implicated in higherorder social functions, including social cognition, mental state knowledge, and social decision-making ( Amodio and Frith, 2006 ;Rilling and Sanfey, 2011 ), abilities that are known to develop in the context of maternal care ( Monroy et al, 2010 ). The dense cross-brain linkage emanating from the mother's right frontal cortex accords with the well-known mechanism of "external regulation" ( Hofer, 1995 ), the process by which the mature maternal brain molds the child's immature brain and tunes it to social life through inter-brain mechanisms embedded within coordinated social behavior ( Feldman, 2015( Feldman, , 2021.…”

Socioeconomic risk moderates the association between caregiver cortisol levels and infant cortisol reactivity to emotion induction at 24 months

“…We interpret these findings within the framework of Hofer's (1994Hofer's ( , 2010 "hidden regulators" hypothesis, which claims that there are regulatory components of the mother-infant relationship that are not immediately apparent when simply observing behavior. Specifically, the associations between maternal cortisol levels and infant cortisol responses were present over and above parenting behavior, maternal depression, IPV, or infant emotional reactivity.…”

“…This suggests that maternal cortisol was a more robust predictor than the other proximal, observational and self-report variables. We interpret these findings within the framework of Hofer's (1994Hofer's ( , 2010 "hidden regulators" hypothesis, which claims that there are regulatory components of the mother-infant relationship that are not immediately apparent when simply observing behavior. We suggest that caregiver stress physiology can operate as an indirect, nonconscious, covert regulating mechanism of child stress response physiology.…”

Caregiver and Young Child Biological Attunement In Distress Contexts: A Systematic Review and Narrative Synthesis

“…skin-to-skin contact that modulates infant heart rate, sleep patterns, and temperature; Feldman et al, 2002;Moore et al, 2016). Caregiver physiology, through its effect on caregiver behaviours in response to their child's distress (e.g., sensitive or insensitive behaviours), bodily contact with the child (e.g., skin-to-skin contact), and the sensory experience of the child (e.g., the child hearing caregiver's calm heart rate during skin-to-skin contact), operates as a "hidden regulator" of young children's physiological response (Braren et al, 2019;Hofer, 2010). As such, biological attunement provides a unique window into understanding coregulatory dynamics of the caregiver-child relationship.…”