Neurobehavioral Effects of Prenatal Mindfulness Training on Maternal Presence and Compassionate Love

Plain-language summary

This study investigates how prenatal mindfulness training fosters prosocial qualities a mother brings to parenting-specifically, her ability to be present with and experience compassionate love for her child. The mother-child relationship profoundly shapes the way humans learn to experience the world and relate to other people. It is known that mothers who respond more sensitively to their infant's emotional cues form more secure attachment relationships that, in turn, foster positive social-emotional development in the child. Thus, programs that strengthen the capacities supporting maternal sensitivity, such as mothers' ability to attend fully to their child's range of emotions with compassion and lovingkindness, hold great potential for promoting intergenerational well-being. Ideally, such capacities would be cultivated before the child is even born so as to have the greatest cumulative impact. Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting (MBCP) is a 9-week program developed to train pregnant women and their partners in the foundations of mindfulness and prepare them to apply mindfulness to birthing and parenting an infant. The intervention has shown beneficial effects on women's psychological wellbeing but has not yet been studied in relation to parenting outcomes. In addition, little is known about (a) biobehavioral mechanisms of action in MBCP, and (b) characteristics of expectant mothers that may moderate the impact of the training. It is important to address these gaps to determine the scope of prenatal mindfulness training effects and who could benefit most from such a program. This study aims to fill these gaps through an active comparison, randomized controlled trial (RCT) of MBCP compared to (non-mindfulness-based) childbirth education. The investigators will compare mothers who have completed MBCP to mothers with no mindfulness training on both behavioral (self-report) and biological (neural activation to infant cues) indices of prosocial parenting qualities toward the following aims: Aim 1: Determine the effect of prenatal mindfulness training on self-report measures of maternal presence and compassionate love. Hypothesis 1: Mothers who have taken part in MBCP will report higher levels of mindful presence, love, and compassion for their infants. These differences will be evident both immediately following the course and sustained later with their infants. Aim 2: Determine the effect of prenatal mindfulness training on neural activation to one's infant in regions supporting presence and compassionate love. Including neural measures may reveal intervention effects not yet obvious at the behavioral level that have important consequences for mother/infant functioning. Hypothesis 2: Mothers who have taken part in MBCP will show increased neural activation to their infant's emotion cues in brain regions involved in present-centered attention (anterior cingulate cortex \[ACC\] and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex \[dlPFC\]), emotional resonance (ACC, insula, ventral prefrontal cortex \[vPFC\]), and mammalian bonding (striatum). Aim 3: Identify moderating factors that strengthen the effects of prenatal mindfulness training. Hypothesis 3: Mothers who begin the class with more risk characteristics (single parent, greater distress) will show greater benefits of MBCP, as will those with higher mindfulness practice dosage. Addressing these aims will shed much-needed light on the ways that mindfulness training during a key developmental life transition can enhance prosocial qualities that contribute to the health and well-being of subsequent generations.

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