Anne Juul Bjertrup defends her PhD thesis

Title

'Mother-infant Interaction, Psychophysiological and neurocognitive responses to infant emotion in mothers with Affective Disorders (MIPAD)'

Time and place

Thursday, 12 November 2020 at 13:00.

The defence will take place online on Zoom.

Click here to attend the defence on Zoom.

Passcode: 931480.

Due to the COVID-19 regulations, there will unfortunately not be a reception after the defence.

Assessment committee

• Professor MSO Susanne Harder, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (chair)

• Senior Lecturer Rebecca Pearson, University of Bristol, United Kingdom

• Professor Morten Kringelbach, The Queen’s College, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Supervisors

• Professor MSO Kamilla Woznica Miskowiak, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (principal supervisor)
  
  
• Associate Professor Mette Skovgaard Væver, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (co-supervisor)

Abstract

Affective disorders are highly heritable but the contribution of possible subtle but continuous difficulties in the early mother–infant interactions to the transmission of risk is unclear. Pregnancy and early motherhood likely involve neurocognitive changes that enable mothers to ‘tune in to’ and respond with greater sensitivity to infant signals of emotion. Such adaptive changes may be compromised in mothers with affective disorders because aberrant neurocognitive responses to emotional stimuli are core features of these disorders.
The thesis provides (I) an overview and synthesis of the current evidence for and (II) an empirical investigation of the neuronal and affective cognitive changes accompanying motherhood in women with and without affective disorders as well as their association with mother–infant interactions and infant development.
Key findings indicate that healthy mothers show more attention toward emotional infant stimuli than control women without young children. In contrast, mothers with affective disorders display blunted attentional and psychophysiological responses toward infant stimuli compared with healthy mothers. In addition, mothers with unipolar disorder and bipolar disorder displayed some negative and positive cognitive biases, respectively, in their neurocognitive processing of infant stimuli. Across all mothers, some measures of aberrant neurocognitive responses to infant stimuli correlated with delayed infant development or less sensitive maternal behavior.
The perspective of the thesis is ultra-early prophylactic interventions targeting aberrant neurocognitive responses to infant emotional signals in mothers with affective disorders and early prevention of the transmission of mental illness from these mothers to their children.