Maternal learned helplessness and physiologic response to infant crying

Maternal response to infant crying was studied by exposing mothers of young infants to varying degrees of control over the termination of infant crying. As adapted from the learned-helplessness paradigm, each mother was tested on an instrumental shuttle box task following exposure to one of three instrumental pretreatments: (a) escape-four button presses terminated the infant cry; (b) inescape-button press was unrelated to cry termination; and (c) control-mothers passively listened to the cry. Following pretreatment, each mother was given an instrumental shuttle box task consisting of a solvable task with an alternation response that controlled cry termination. Cardiac responses were monitored throughout the session. On the performance measures, mothers pretreated with inescapable infant crying showed debilitated performance on the second task. Failure to escape, number of trials to escape criterion and latency of response to the cry were all greater for the inescape group compared with escape and control mothers, with exception that inescapable and control mothers did not differ significantly on response latency scores. In addition, only mothers with prior experience controlling the cry showed cardiac deceleration, an index of attentional processing, during a 10-sec anticipatory period preceding the cry episode of the solvable instrumental task. These cardiac data provide suggestive evidence that the important behavioral differences may in part be attributable to differential processing of cues signaling the onset of crying.