Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Untreated pain in early infancy can have long-lasting adverse effects. These effects include poor regulation of negative stress, increased responses to painful events later in life, and psychological consequences such as elevated anxiety, distress, and anger. Healthy infants endure various painful procedures, with needle pain being the most common. Since infants are incapable of soothing themselves, parent behaviours are important during these procedures. Some parent behaviours have been shown to decrease infant distress while others have been associated with increased infant distress. Despite a parent's intention to soothe their infant when using reassuring statements (e.g. "it's okay, you're fine"), several studies have found an association between reassurance and increased infant pain. This study will investigate the underlying mechanisms of reassurance by examining verbal and non-verbal factors expressed by parents, specifically verbal content and facial expressions, when using reassurance. It is hypothesized that verbal content and facial expressions will play a role in helping to explain the link between verbal reassurance and infant pain. The proposed study will involve videotaping parents and their infants during routine immunizations at 2, 6, and 12-months of age. These videotapes will be coded for infant pain behaviours, parental use of reassurance, and parental facial expressions while using reassurance. This study will help us to better understand how verbal content and facial expressions impact infant pain and why reassurance is associated with infant pain and distress. This research has implications for interventions and best practices used by parents during infant immunizations. Findings from this research will help us to implement strategies to relieve infant pain during immunizations and reduce the negative long-term health outcomes associated with infant pain.