INFANT BEHAVIOR AND DEVELOPMENT 9, 473-478 (1986)

Effects of Maternal Unavailability on Mother-Infant Interactions

TIFFANY FIELD, NITZA VEGA-LAHR, FRANK SCAFIDLAND SHERI GOLDSTEIN

Mailman Center -for Child Development University of Miami Medical School

To determine the differential effects of maternal emotional and physical unavail- ability on infont interaction behavior, 4-month-old infants were subjected to the mothers’ still-face and too brief separation from the mother. Although the infants became more negative and agitated during both conditions, the still-face was more stressful.

maternal unavailability separation still-face

The mother’s role during early interactions with her infant is thought to be one of providing adequate stimulation and arousal modulation (Brazelton, Kos- lowski, & Main, 1974; Field, 1982; Stern, 1971; Tronick, Als, & Brazelton, 1977). If the mother is physically unavailable, for example, during separations (Field, 1986), or emotionally unavailable, for example, when she is depressed (Cohn, Tronick, & Matias, 1986; Field, 1984), the infant becomes distressed and disorganized, reputedly because the infant has lost an important source of stimulation and arousal modulation.

Maternal separation has been considered the most stressful loss situation for the infant, both in animal models (Reite, Short, Seiler, & Pauley, 1981; Schanberg, & Field, 1986) and human studies (Field, 1985b). However, recent observations on continuing distress following reunions suggest that even when the mother is physically available, if she is emotionally unavailable, the infant remains distressed (Field, 1986; Reite & Capitanio, 1985). These observations have been made in the context of the mother returning with the new infant after the delivery of that infant; the mother is often tired, depressed, and pre- occupied with the new infant, thus being less emotionally available to her older infant.

Several. experimental perturbations of mother-infant interactions have been used to mimic emotional unavailability of the mother. For example, asking

This research was supported by NIMH Research Scientist Development Award #MHOO331 to the first author. We wish to thank the mothers and infants who participated in this study and Kerry Collins, Marcia Soto, and Wendy Tuttle for their research assistance.

Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Tiffany Field, Mailman Center for Child Development, University of Miami Medical School, P.O. Box 016820, Miami, FL 33101.

473

474 FIELD, VEGA-LAHR, SCAFIDI, AND GOLDSTEIN

normal mothers to look depressed (Cohn & Tronick, 1983; Field, 1984) or to remain still-faced (Fogel, Diamond, Langhorst, & Demos, 1982; Stoller & Field, 1982; Tronick, Als, Adamson, Wise, & Brazelton, 1978) results in emo- tional unavailability of the mother. In both cases, the mother is unresponsive and the infant, after attempting to reinstate a normal interaction, becomes distressed. Thus, both physical and emotional unavailability of the mother appeared to be distressing to the young infant.

Since the very young infant’s differential responses to physical and emo- tional unavailability of the mother have not been investigated, the purpose of this study was to compare the effects of brief separations and brief still-face interactions. Spontaneous interactions preceded and followed these to serve as baseline and reunion episodes.

The sample was comprised of 44 4-month-old (M= 17.2 weeks) infants. Due to excessive fussiness during the interaction procedure 12 infants were excluded, yielding a final sample of 32 infants (16 females) and their middle-income uni- versity faculty mothers. For the interactions the infant was positioned in an upright infant seat placed on a table at eye level with the mother who was seated approximately 18 inches (46 centimeters) away facing the infant. The room was equipped with two cameras positioned approximately 182.88 cm from the mother and infant at an angle such that they were in the periphery of the sub- jects’ visual fields. A split screen generator enabled the viewing of the mother’s face and torso on one side of the screen and the entire body of the infant on the other. Each mother-infant dyad engaged in 6 interaction conditions of 1.5 min each; a baseline, a perturbation, and a reunion condition for each of the two perturbation sequences (separation and still-face). The order of the sepa- ration and still-face sequences was counterbalanced across infants to control for order and state effects, with a 3-min. interval separating the two inter- action perturbation sequences. For the baseline and reunion conditions (spon- taneous interactions), the mother was simply asked to engage her infant in play as she would do at home. For the separation condition, the mother left the table and moved behind a curtained partition. For the still-face condition the mother was instructed to remain silent while looking at her infant with an im- mobile face. The mother was signaled to change conditions by a knocking sound made on the one-way mirror by the experimenter who was monitoring the videorecorder in the adjacent room. The videotapes were then coded (using an event recorder) during a single pass through the videotapes for the duration of behaviors exhibited by the mothers and their infants. Duration rather than frequency was used as a dependent measure so that the data could be converted to proportion of interaction time that behaviors occurred, thus enabling com- parisons across data sets derived from interactions of varying durations. The infant behaviors included smiling, vocalizing, motor activity, gaze aversion, distress brow, and crying. The behaviors coded for the mother included smiling, exaggerated facial expressions, vocalizing, touching, and moving the infant’s limbs. Coders, naive to the hypotheses of the study, were trained to greater than 80% reliability. Interobserver reliabilities were calculated by Cohen’s

MATERNAL UNAVAILABILITY 475

Kappa (Bartko & Carpenter, 1976) a chance-corrected statistic. Interobserver reliability was than assessed. by the simultaneous coding of one-half of the videotapes and averaged .85 (R = .81- .93) for the infants and .92 (R = 89 - .97) for the mothers.

Analyses of variance were first performed to determine whether there was an order effect for the separation and still-face conditions. Since the order in which the infants experienced these conditions did not affect the infants’ be- haviors, the data were collapsed across orders for each condition. Repeated- measures analyses of variance were then performed for each of the separation and still-faced interaction -sequences with condition (baseline, perturbation, and reunion) as the repeated measure. Post hoc comparisons were made by Bonferroni t tests. These analyses were performed separately rather than nest- ing each condition within the two perturbation sequences because the direction of change in behavior differed for the two perturbations. For example, there was no gaze aversion in the separation situation by virtue of the mother being absent, while gaze aversion increased during the still-face condition.

For the separation sequence the following effects were noted (see Table 1): (a) the incidence of infant smiling and gaze aversion (as already noted) was sig- nificantly less during the separation condition; (b) infant motor activity and crying increased significantly during the separation condition and remained elevated during the reunion; (c) infant distress brow occurred significantly more often during the reunion than the preceding conditions; (d) maternal smiling occurred more often during the reunion than the baseline condition; (e) maternal tactile and kinesthetic stimulation occurred significantly less often during the reunion than the baseline condition.

For the still-face sequence the following changes occurred (see Table 1): (a) infant gaze aversion occurred more often during the still-face with a return to baseline during the reunion condition; (b) infant smiling decreased during the still-face with a return to baseline during the reunion condition; (c) infant motor activity, distress brow, and crying increased significantly during the still-face and remained elevated during the reunion condition.

Repeated-measures analyses of variance were then performed for the differ- ent conditions across perturbation sequences (separation and still-face), that is, the two baselines, perturbations, and reunions. No differences were noted across perturbation sequences for baseline or reunion behavior of the infants. However, differences were noted between the infants’ behaviors during the ac- tual perturbations: Infant motor activity, gaze aversion, distress brow, and crying occurred more often during the still-face than the separation perturba- tion. For similar analyses of the mother behaviors, no differences were noted in baseline behaviors. However, during reunions the mothers smiled more fre- quently following the separation versus the still-face perturbation and pro- vided more tactile and kinesthetic stimulation following the still-face than the separation perturbation.

It is perhaps not surprising that the infant becomes affectively less positive (less smiling), more agitated (greater motor activity), and affectively more

TABL

E 1

Mea

n Pr

opor

tion

Tim

e th

at

Mot

hers

’ an

d In

fant

s’ In

tera

ctio

n Be

havio

rs

Occu

rred

Durin

g th

e Se

para

tion

and

Still-

Face

Pe

rturb

otio

ns

(Inte

rcod

er

Relia

bilit

v Co

effic

ient

s in

Pa

rent

hese

s).

Sepa

ratio

n

Pertu

rbat

ion

Still-

Face

Infa

nt

Beha

viors

Ba

selin

e Se

para

tion

Reun

ion

F Ba

selin

e St

ill-Fa

ce

Reun

ion

F

Smili

ng

(.B9)

m

b 01

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6.

11”’

10,

mb

Voca

lizin

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5)

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otor

ac

tivity

(B

O)

0%

15b

19b

5.29

” 0%

2l

b’

Gaze

av

ersio

n (.B

l) 3%

0%

3%

B&

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360

ma’

Di

stres

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ow

(.Bl)

02.

04.

lob

5.37

**

01.

mb’

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ying

(93)

01

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6)

2%

- 46

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12”

27,

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Exag

gera

ted

face

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4)

04

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are

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dica

ted

by

F vo

lues

for

repe

ated

m

easu

res

effe

cts.

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-face

>sep

arat

ion,

F=

4.26,

p<.O

5 in

co

mpa

rison

of

str

ess

cond

itions

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7.58

”

MATERNAL UNAVAILABILITY 477

negative (increased gaze averting, distress brow and crying) when the mother is physically or emotionally unavailable. Although separation paradigms have rarely been used with infants this young (cf. Fogel, 1980), it is not surprising that the infant would become distressed and disorganized in the absence of the mother, who typically is the primary source of stimulation and arousal modula- tion for the infant and who usually would not leave the infant alone during wakeful states. That the infant continues to be distressed following reunion with the mother (as manifested by increased motor activity, distressed brow, and crying) is also not surprising, at least for the still-face perturbation, given previous reports on this paradigm (Fogel et al., 1982; Tronick et al., 1978).

What is surprising is that the still-face paradigm appeared to be more dis- tressing to the infant than the separation paradigm, as manifested by greater motor activity, distress brow, and crying. Relatively little distress following brief separations from the mother has also been reported for a-month-old in- fants by Fogel (1980). It seems that the violation of expectancy in the still-face situation (the mother being suddenly unresponsive in a typically ‘interactive situation) and her emotional unavailability is more distressing to the infant than simply being left alone with the infant’s own resources. Analogies in the literature are the anesthetized mother rat who is unresponsive to her pup (Schanberg & Field, 1986) and depressed mothers of human infants who tend to leave their infants physically alone (Cohn et al., 1986). Being left alone by the depressed mother may be less stressful for the infant than experiencing the mother as unresponsive or emotionally unavailable.

Of some interest was the observation that, following separation, mothers tended to engage in more greeting behavior (smiling) and less comforting be- haviors (tactile and kinesthetic stimulation) than they did following the still- face situation. This appears to be directly responsive to the situational features; that is, greeting behaviors are appropriate following a separation, and to the infant’s state, that is, the infant demonstrated more protest/despair behavior in the still-face situation which appeared to elicit more proximal, comforting (or containing) behaviors in the mother. Inasmuch as the infants showed more behavioral change following the still-face condition, and the mothers follow- ing the separation condition, it would appear that the still-face condition is more distressing to the infant, and the separation condition, more distressing to the mother. It would seem adaptive that the infant can call upon its own re- sources during separation, protest about the mother’s unavailability during the still-face, and for the mother to behave more anxious about being separated from the infant. The mothers appeared to respond appropriately, that is, to greet their infants following the less stressful separation and to comfort their infants following the more stressful, still-face situation.

These data are suggestive of the dynamics of maternal unavailability. More prolonged perturbations of the separation and still-face situations are needed as Well as more complex analyses of the interactive patterns to elucidate the process and effects of maternal unavailability.

478 FIELD, VEGA-LAHR, SCAFIDI, AND GOLDSTEIN

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20 May 1986; Revised 26 August 1986 n