Research Symposium

BIO

My name is Alexa Esquenazi and I am a from Hollywood, FL. I am second year student studying Behavioral Neuroscience and plan to attend medical school after my 4 years at Florida State University, where I then hope to become a Pediatric Neurologist.

Parent Daily Emotion Study: A Look on Parental Depression and its Outcomes

Abstract

Parental Depression is a recurring problem that many mothers and fathers exhibit in the first months of their newborns life. Our present study aims to gain a better understanding of parents’ daily emotions with newborns ages four to seven months old. Participants completed a daily survey on Qualtrics for 36 days expressing their current emotions and experiences with their newborn. While this current experiment is not complete, and we do not have well-rounded results, from past literature we expect to see parents with newborns experiencing higher levels of depression that can be caused by postnatal depression specifically in mothers. Parents who report higher levels of depression have an association with their children's emotional problems (Pietikainen et al., 2019). Parents who do exhibit depression have a higher chance of utilizing neglectful parenting tactics. Understanding parental depression and what it stems from allows researchers and psychologists to come up with better intervention strategies for these parents.

Keywords: depression, daily, parents