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

Unrelieved and poorly managed infant pain can have detrimental effects on infant development (Anand, Grunau, & Oberlander, 1997). In order to avoid these deleterious outcomes, it is imperative to understand how different factors can influence infant pain distress and regulation over time. Several studies have pointed to the fact that caregiving behaviors, such as sensitive and emotionally available caregiving, are linked to lower pain expressions and faster distress regulation during painful procedures such as routine immunizations (e.g. Axia & Bonichini, 2005; Din, Pillai Riddell & Gordner, in press). Despite the important role caregiver behaviors play in infant pain related distress and regulation, no studies to date have attempted to investigate the risk factors for suboptimal caregiving behaviors during painful events or have examined the developmental trajectories of caregiving behaviors during painful procedures. The goal of this study is to investigate risk factors for suboptimal caregiving behaviors during routine infant immunizations over the first year of life. The roles that infant variables (e.g. temperament, gender, health) as well as caregiver variables (e.g. social stressors (i.e. age, education, number of children at home, perceived social stress), ethnicity, and gender) play on caregiver interactive behavior during infant immunizations will be observed. The impact of these infant and caregiver variables on the developmental trajectories of caregiver interactive behavior will be explored. It is hoped that the results from this study will help inform the practice of infant mental health by providing longitudinal and developmental data pertaining to the risk factors for suboptimal caregiving quality during distressing situations over the infant's first year of life. As such, it is believed that this study will have important clinical implications for interventions designed at improving the quality of caregiver-infant interactions in at risk families.