Desenvolvimento socioemocional de bebês: contribuições da personalidade materna e constituição psíquica

Abstract

Certain biological and/or environmental factors can influence areas of neurodevelopment, particularly social-emotional development. This type of development is strongly associated with mental health and encompasses how infants interact with people, deal with adversities, and express and understand a multitude of emotional signals. The overall objective of this thesis is to understand the social-emotional development of infants up to 24 months of age and the relationships established with maternal personality and psychic constitution (motherinfant relationships). This is a cross-sectional study conducted at a Municipal Health Unit, involving 40 participants, mothers and their infants. The instruments used included a sociodemographic questionnaire, a social-emotional scale from the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (Bayley-III), Clinical Indicators of Risk for Infant Development (IRDI), and the short form of the Five-Factor Inventory. Four complementary studies were conducted to contribute to the understanding of the overall objective. The first study aimed to systematically review the relationships between personality dimensions and child development. The review indicated that social-emotional, cognitive, motor, and language domains are positively affected by low indices of neuroticism and higher indices of extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness. The second study highlighted the importance of social-emotional development for early infancy and the contribution that the relationship between mother-infant and psychic constitution can offer to the understanding of this type of development. Better results were related to lower scores of absent indicators for the psychic constitution, indicating good progress in the mother-infant relationship as well. The third study provided an overview of the associations between maternal personality dimensions and the psychic constitution of infants up to 24 months of age. The results indicated that the more predominant the dimension of neuroticism, the greater the number of absent reference indicators. Dimensions such as extraversion and openness, as reported by mothers, were classified with average scores, while agreeableness and conscientiousness, which received overall lower ratings, were negatively correlated with outcomes for the psychic constitution. The fourth study sought to understand how factors associated with maternal personality and sociodemographic variables might be related to social-emotional development. Among the results, noteworthy are personality dimensions such as agreeableness and openness to experience, which were negatively and positively correlated, respectively, with social-emotional development. The infant's younger age and breastfeeding were associated with good social-emotional outcomes. The data as a whole emphasize that personality traits and sociodemographic variables are useful and relevant markers for child social-emotional development, mother-infant relationships, and health policies.