About this session

Friday, 4:40 PM - 6:10 PM

Interpersonal Trauma, Attachment, and Child Development: Navigating Emotional Landscapes in the Caregiving Relationship

The caregiving relationship is essential to children’s psychological development, yet it can be disrupted by both maternal and child trauma exposure. While research documents associations between trauma exposure and developmental outcomes, less work examines how trauma specifically affects the caregiving relationship in low-income, at-risk populations. Using a multi-method approach, this symposium examines parenting behavior as a key mechanism through which interpersonal trauma influences the caregiving dynamic in four high-risk samples. The first study explores dyadic co-construction of emotion narratives, showing how child maltreatment is associated with the mother’s ability to provide sensitive guidance and patterns of negative emotion in children. Continuing this focus on affective communication, the second study examines maternal trauma and responses to children’s previously undisclosed memories of fear, demonstrating salient links between maternal trauma and expressions of anger and abandonment during emotion discussion. The final two presentations focus on pregnancy as an important developmental period for examining the intersection of trauma and parenting. The third study examines a potential mechanism underlying the association between trauma exposure and parenting, finding that PTSD symptoms during pregnancy help explain the link between maternal childhood trauma and parenting behavior. The final study examines pre- and postnatal maternal representations of the child in an IPV-exposed sample using the Working Model of the Child Interview and demonstrates how prenatal representations in particular predict later parenting behavior. Overall, findings illustrate how trauma can disrupt caregiving in vulnerable populations and highlights pregnancy as an important period for trauma screening and intervention.

Paper #1
Title	Indirect Effect of Maltreatment on Child Cooperative Engagement through Maternal Sensitive Guidance
Presenting author	Jennie Marie Boulus, University of Notre Dame, United States

Paper #2
Title	Trauma, Attachment, and Affective Communication: Examining Latine Mothers’ Responses to Children’s Fearful Memories
Presenting author	Lyric Noelle Russo, University of California, Irvine, United States

Paper #3
Title	Pregnancy PTSD symptoms: A Potential Explanatory Link in the Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma
Presenting author	Matthew Marvin, Michigan State University, United States

Paper #4
Title	Prenatal and Postnatal Representations of the Child and Parenting in the Context of Trauma Exposure
Presenting author	Joohee Lee, Michigan State University, United States

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Session chairs
Matthew Marvin, Michigan State University, United States; Lyric Noelle Russo, , United States

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