About The Strong Starts Research Program 

Based on what I learned from my  research conducted under Pillar 1, in Pillar 2, I focus on examining if early interventions can optimize early brain development to get infants and children off to the strongest possible start  in life. I led the world’s first study that examined if treating maternal postpartum depression (PPD) with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) could improve neurophysiological and behavioural markers of infant emotion regulation. Following maternal CBT treatment, infants exhibited adaptive improvements across all indices of emotion regulation and no longer differed on these indices from the healthy control infants of non-depressed mothers. I also aimed to explore if our CBT treatment program could adaptively improve how mothers transmit regulatory support to their infants in real-time.  In the healthy dyads, at multiple study visits across the first year of life, increases in maternal HRV influenced subsequent decreases in infant heart rate variability (HRV) measured at the next second, an effect that strengthened (i.e., improved) throughout the stress task. In the dyads affected by maternal PPD, this same effect was observed, but only after the mothers received CBT treatment. This research was not only the first to reveal a putative mechanism through which mothers transmit regulatory support to their stressed child in real-time but showed that these processes could be altered via intervention.