Tag: Andrea Imhof

Evaluating Responsive Caregiving Behaviors within the FIND Intervention

Presenter: Heather Ralph – Biology, Psychology

Faculty Mentor(s): Andrea Imhof, Phil Fisher

Session: (In-Person) Oral Panel—Connection and Community

Interventions that emphasize responsive caregiving can reverse the negative effects of early life stress exposure on development in early childhood. Despite this knowledge, there is a lack of consensus in the field about which behaviors define “responsive caregiving”. The Filming Interactions to Nurture Development (FIND) Intervention is a responsive caregiving intervention that guides caregivers towards serve and return interactions that follows the child’s lead. Preliminary evidence from pilot trials suggest that the FIND intervention may significantly impact both caregiver and child outcomes, but it is not yet known how FIND changes the way caregivers and children interact. The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether FIND increases the frequency of caregiver “following” behaviors during a dyadic freeplay tasks. Results from a pilot trial using 18 mother-infant dyads (9 FIND families and 9 control families) will be presented, highlighting ways that the FIND intervention changes the nature of dyadic interaction. Implications for analyzing responsive caregiving behaviors, limitations, and next steps for evaluating the FIND intervention will be discussed.

Cultural Considerations of the Filming Interactions to Nurture Development Intervention

Presenter: Alvin Lengkong – Psychology

Faculty Mentor(s): Andrea Imhof

Session: (In-Person) Poster Presentation

The relationship between exposure to adverse childhood experiences and adult health risk has been well established (Felitti et al., 1998). Fortunately, research has shown that interventions can disrupt this cycle and even reverse these effects. A strong, established relationship between an infant and a caregiver can act as a “buffer” that regulates and dampens the infant’s physiological response to stress (Flannery et al., 2017; Hostinar et al., 2014). The Filming Interactions to Nurture Development (FIND) intervention is a strengths-based video coaching program designed to disrupt the consequences of early exposure to toxic stress and promote naturally occurring, developmentally supportive interactions between infants and their caregivers (Fisher et al., 2016). While the FIND intervention has been shown to be effective in improving certain child and parent outcomes, the literature has often overlooked the importance of cultural factors when implementing parenting interventions. The focus of this paper will be to explore the cultural differences between English- speaking and Spanish-speaking families, and to identify if these differences influenced the intervention’s effects on parent outcomes (e.g. parent sense of competence). Implications and limitations of the FIND intervention’s cultural considerations will be discussed.

Promoting Early Child Development: Improving Language Outcomes Through Reciprocal Interaction

Presenter: Alex Bui − Neuroscience

Faculty Mentor(s): Andrea Imhof, Philip Fisher

(Virtual) Poster Presentation

The quality of early parent-child interactions has a powerful influence on early brain development.
In light of emerging literature associating responsive caregiving behaviors with children’s cognitive and socio-emotional development, recent prevent initiatives have aimed to promote responsive parenting behaviors through caregiver interventions . Promising preliminary evidence from the Filming Interactions to Nurture Development (FIND) intervention reveals that promoting the quality of parent-child interaction may enhance both parent functioning and child development, but the mechanism(s) of change underlying these improvements has not been directly evaluated. A limited number of studies have employed micro-social coding measures to quantify responsive caregiving behaviors on a moment-to-moment scale, and even fewer have investigated the downstream effects of these caregiving behaviors on child language outcomes. The two primary goals of this study were to 1) evaluate whether FIND significantly increases the frequency of balanced, reciprocal interaction and 2) examine the relationship between pre-post changes in dyadic reciprocity and child language outcomes. The results of this study support promoting parental contingent responsiveness as a viable intervention target and presents an innovative framework to examine latent effects of pre-post change across an intervention period.