Funding Request for Research Proposal:
The tragedy of 9/11 women who were pregnant and widowed and their infants
Beatrice Beebe PhD; Clinical Professor, NYS Psychiatric Institute, Columbia University
Acute traumatic loss has wide-ranging effects on ordinary individuals, especially parents and children, yet infants and young children are often forgotten in a disaster. In October, 2001, Beatrice Beebe, a mother-infant researcher and therapist, together with other highly trained therapists, began a therapeutic project to try to help these women and their infants born after 9/11. This project also had a research component. Mothers and infants were seen for a video-based therapeutic consultation. Because of our therapeutic involvement we have a unique set of videotapes of mother-infant interaction which we now propose to analyze for research. We are seeking funding for this purpose.
Traumatically bereaved parents are preoccupied with loss and often have difficulty being fully emotionally available to their infants. These effects of trauma are well-recognized in the clinical community but are insufficiently studied with research methods. We now know that mother-infant nonverbal communication forms the foundation of emotional development, with lasting lifespan consequences. Mother-infant communication is also a sensitive index of risk and resilience. While there has been a lot of other research, our study is the first to examine the impact of the 9/11 traumatic loss on mother-infant communication.
Our findings will likely be generalizable to other disasters. We anticipate that our findings will be able to be used to improve methods therapy for mothers and infants in future disasters. Moreover our research could help to motivate other mothers to seek early intervention in future disasters.
Research Question: Did the 9/11 trauma/loss alter the nature of mother-infant communication?
Mothers and infants in nontraumatized samples engage in mutual gaze, a potent form of bonding; they coordinate by following the partner’s direction of gaze as each looks at and away from the other. They engage in facial mirroring and coordinate by matching each other’s positive/negative shifts. As each coordinates with the other, extremes of hyper-reactivity or withdrawal are absent. How will the 9/11 mothers and infants differ from our non-traumatized mother-infant community sample?
Approach: We will examine videotaped mother-infant interactions collected in the course of the therapy project 2002-2003 when infants were 4 months and 12 months. We will compare them to our non-traumatized sample, matched on education and ethnicity, with identical videotaping methods. Precise second-by-second video coding, with sophisticated statistical methods, functions like a social microscope, identifying different patterns of relating. This method has demonstrated importance in community and risk samples in our prior work over the past 3 decades.
Our research will document risk and resilience patterns in 9/11 vs. community dyads. We will be able to determine if the risk or resilience pattern is: (i) in the mother’s behavior, the infant’s behavior, or both; (ii) in overly reactive/vigilant or withdrawn modes of response to the partner; and (iii) in specific modalities of communication, that is, attention, emotion, orientation, and touch. For example, do 9/11 mothers and infants differ in the way they manage visual attention to each other? Or the way they manage emotional communication with each other?
Preliminary analyses on looking patterns have provided indications of risk and resilience and illustrate the feasibility of our method.
FUNDING GOAL $100,000; Check made out to Columbia University. Mail to Dr. Beatrice Beebe, NYS Psychiatric Institute #108, 1051 Riverside Drive, NY, NY 10032.
The therapy project is described in Beebe et al. (Eds.) (2012). Mothers, infants and young children of September 11, 2001: A primary prevention project. New York: Routledge Press. The therapists of the project are Phyllis Cohen, K. Mark Sossin, Anni Bergman, Sally Moskowitz, Rita Reiswig, Suzi Tortora and Donna Demetri Friedman.
Beatrice Beebe, Ph.D.
Clinical Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry
College of Physicians and Surgeons
Columbia University
http://nyspi.org/Communication_Sciences/index.html
Mailing Address:
NYS Psychiatric Institute #108
1051 Riverside Drive
New York, NY 10032