Grant: DRA : Canada Graduate Research Scholarship - Doctoral Program (CGRS D)

Preterm infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) experience up to 17 painful procedures daily. Early repeated pain exposure has been linked to longstanding adverse impacts on development. Parents of preterm infants often watch their infant undergo life-threatening medical emergencies and are faced with a restricted parental role. Thus, parenting a preterm infant comes with a significantly increased risk of experiencing complex trauma symptomatology, resulting in less attuned interactions with their infants. Dyadic attunement refers to the physiological synchrony between a parent and child that is most-often studied in distress regulation contexts. Suboptimal dyadic attunement throughout the first months of life can lead to less effective distress regulation for the infant throughout life. My research has demonstrated the importance of the maternal-infant relationship for regulation during distressing events (Hashemi, Cohen, Garvey et al., submitted). However, this relationship is severely compromised when infants are born premature and hospitalized in the NICU. Through a randomized controlled trial, the current proposed study aims to explore the impact of a trauma intervention on both self-reported maternal trauma and stress symptomology and on mother-infant dyadic cardiac attunement regulation for 5-minutes after an acute distress procedure (routine infant heel lance for blood sampling), using electrocardiography (ECG). 60 mothers and/or birthing parents and their preterm infants will be randomized to either a treatment or wait-list control. Between groups, differences in symptoms of psychopathology will be compared and variability in dyadic attunement trajectories post-lance will be described and contrasted. In the long-term, this study could shape gold-standard practices of how to partner with parents to best support parent-infant health in the NICU and provide valuable data about the mechanisms which underlie dyadic pain-related distress responses.