Depressed Mother's Positive Affect with their Partners and their Infants: Evidence for Compensatory Effects
Open Access
- Author:
- Level, Rachel
- Graduate Program:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- June 10, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Ginger A Moore, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Kristin Ann Buss, Committee Member
Amy Dyanna Marshall, Committee Member - Keywords:
- maternal depression
parenting
infancy
family systems
compensatory
spillover
marital conflict - Abstract:
- Marital conflict and parenting quality have been consistently linked. Previous research has generally found that negative marital relationships are associated, concurrently, with less warm parenting (i.e., spillover theory). However, when examining time-lagged effects, Kouros et al. (2014) found that mothers may compensate following unsatisfying marital interactions by investing more positively in parenting. Mothers with depression, who typically experience more marital conflict than other mothers, may show a greater compensatory effect with their infants than other mothers in an effort to regulate the relatively greater negative affect elicited during marital conflict. The current study examined sequential effects in mothers’ (N = 46) observed negative and positive affect coded during marital discussions and subsequent play interactions with their 7-month-old infants. In addition, mothers’ self-reported depressive symptoms were assessed using the BDI-II and tested as a potential moderator of this association. Although all mothers were more positive with their infants than during discussions with partners, higher levels of depressive symptoms were related to a greater increase in positive affect with infants following more negative interactions with partners. Findings support compensatory theory and suggest that depressed mothers may try to attenuate negative affect related to marital relationships by enhancing positive interactions with their infants.