Moving infant depression out of the shadows

Ed Tronick is an internationally renowned child development specialist, currently studying, with National Science Foundation support, how babies learn to cope with stress and how long they can remember the stress.

Tronick is Chief of the Child Development Unit at Children's Hospital Boston. But he isn't a pure researcher. Everything he does bespeaks his passion to achieve broad impact.

To fulfill that passion he accepted a joint position in the Psychology Department of the University of Massachusetts at Boston, so that he can work with urban families who often lack mental health resources.

"These are people who are really struggling," says Tronick. "I want to take my work and use it in a practical setting."

You could see it coming. As a postgraduate in the Psychology Department at Harvard, Tronick took a job at a daycare center in the Bromley - Heath housing project in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. That experience was an eye-opener for him.

"I thought I knew all about infant development from my classes, but I saw babies do things that I knew they couldn't be doing," he says.

Tronick was one of the first researchers to explore the emotional capacities of infants and to show that babies are profoundly affected by their parents' emotional states and behavior. After years of filming the moment-by-moment interactions between depressed mothers and their babies, Tronick came to see depression as a communicable disease, transferred by a mother's communication to her baby and then back from the baby to the mother. A truly vicious cycle.

Out of his studies came his still-face paradigm, which is the standard for studying social emotional development. In this experiment, the mother freezes in front of her child, eliciting increasingly strong reactions as the baby attempts to win back her attention. But after a while, confronted with only that blank face, each child stops trying.

Tronick has revolutionized understanding of the emotional capacities and coping of infants and the effects of factors such as maternal anxiety and depression on infant social emotional development.

In a powerful passage in Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection, by Deborah Blum, Tronick says:

"When I first did the still-face paradigm, I said to people, look at this emotional reaction." Yet the psychologists he showed the pictures to thought that what they saw couldn’t represent emotion. It seemed to Tronick that his colleagues were almost personally uncomfortable with the idea that the connection between mother and child could be so strong, and that relationships could matter that much. "People don’t want to believe that a child could be so hurt—or that we could be so hurtful."

Tronick is always trying to show that depression is a treatable disease. A documentary Tronick helped develop, "Depression: Out of the Shadows." aired on PBS on May 21, 2008.

It features a mother, Ellie, who suffers from depression after the birth of her first son, Graham. It would take Ellie nearly four months to start to feel better. During her ordeal, Ellie noticed that her maternal bond with Graham was suffering.

She says: “I was physically unable to have an expressive face with him and to be able to really smile at him. And when he did start to smile, he never smiled at me. And that was absolutely devastating.”

The documentary features Ellie looking at a video on Ed Tronick’s web site [edward.tronick.org]: "Mom puts on the still-face, and Michael tries everything he can to reestablish connection." The web site helped Ellie to realize that treating her depression would not only help her, but also minimize Graham's risk of becoming depressed. “It just breaks my heart to see those video clips, though, because, you can just feel the pain that those children are experiencing.”

Tronick is off to a fast start at UMass Boston, rolling out an ambitious Infant-Parent Mental Health Certificate Training Program. It offers professionals the opportunity to engage over ten months in leading edge learning with international luminaries. The sessions are opened to the public as a vehicle for expanding inter-disciplinary educational opportunities and enhancing clinical practice in this vitally important field.

Dr. Tronick received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and completed postgraduate training at Harvard University. Over the course of his career, he has co-authored and authored more than 150 scientific papers and chapters. His book, The Neurobehavioral and Social Emotional Development of Infants and Children, is a tour de force according to a review in New England Psychologist.

Tronick's research is part of UMass Boston's Developmental Sciences research cluster. Developmental sciences entail the investigation of progressive changes that occur over the life span of individuals.