2002 International International Biennial Scientific Meeting

COMMUNICATIVE GESTURE IN POSTPARTUM DEPRESSION

Stephen Malloch

Macarthur Auditory Research Centre (MARCS), University of Western Sydney

s.malloch@uws.edu.au

An infant seeks not just encouraging communicative signals from her mother - the signals must be appropriately timed and inflected. When a mother and her healthy young infant interact, communication takes place through the intentions (underlying impulses for action) and affect carried by the 'music-like' qualities of their joint vocalisations in combination with the joint 'dance-like' gestures of body and face. Mother and infant share emotional experience by imitating and complementing the intensity, rhythm, shape, and duration of the other's expression in the same or different modality (motor movements or voice).

In the communicative musicality model of interaction, 'pulse' is the regular succession of discrete behavioural events through time that enables us to anticipate when something will occur between ourselves and another; the 'quality' of an interaction consists of the contours of the gestures, as expressed by changes in the pitch and timbre of the voice, and in the shape and velocity of the bodily movements; and the combination of pulse and quality go together to embed an emotional 'feeling' in the gesture, as well as enabling us to anticipate what will happen next. In the communicative musicality model, mother and infant use gestures of voice and body to shape time into narratives of joint expression that are appreciated by both.

Depressed mothers tend to be less sensitively attuned to their infants, and are less affirming and more negating of infant experience. This presentation reports the results of analyses of communicative musicality of gestures of the voice and body in interactions between non-depressed and depressed mothers with their infants at 3 and 6 months. Parameters discussed include timing, pitch contour of vocalisations, contour of bodily gestures, and experimental rating of the emotion present in the interactions.