Intergenerational transmission of depressive symptoms: Maternal socialization of infant positive affect as a mediator
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Parenting behaviors play an important role in the transmission of depressive symptoms from mothers to children. Although reduced positive affect is a central feature of depression, models of intergenerational transmission have neglected maternal socialization of positive affect as a mediating mechanism. This study investigated whether maternal responses to infant positive affect mediate the link between mothers’ and toddlers’ depressive symptoms. A community sample of 128 mothers (58% White) and their infants ( M age = 6.65 months, SD = 0.53 at first visit) participated in 3 assessments over a 1-year period. Assessments included self-reports of postpartum depressive symptoms, observational measures of maternal responses to infant positive affect and maternal sensitivity, and mother report of toddlers’ depressive problems. Mediation analyses revealed that mothers with elevated postpartum depressive symptoms displayed fewer supportive responses to their infants’ positive affect. In turn, infants who received fewer supportive responses had more depressive problems in toddlerhood. The indirect effect of postpartum depressive symptoms on toddlers’ depressive problems via maternal supportive responses remained significant after controlling for maternal sensitivity. Findings suggest that maternal responses to infant positive affect play a unique role in the intergenerational transmission of depressive symptoms. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".