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Clinical psychology student researching troubled mother-child relationships
I
t’s often been said that child abuse is hereditary. Sarah Ahlfs-Dunn hopes her work can help break the dismal cycle that gives rise to that formulation. No, she’s not a geneticist (it’s a metaphor, after all). She’s a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Eastern Michigan University whose dissertation research is expanding understanding of troubled mother-child relationships and how they might be healed, or even headed off. Psychologists call the
feelings and attitudes a mother has toward her child, both before and after birth, “maternal representations.” When these representations evince negative or unrealistic perceptions, they’re termed “disrupted.” “By the time women reach their third trimester of pregnancy, they typically start to form ideas and impressions, primarily unconscious, about the baby they are carrying and who they will be as a mother to the baby and what their relationship with the baby will be like,” says Ahlfs-Dunn. “Maternal representations are really important because they influence the mother’s behavior with her baby as well as how she interprets and anticipates
her baby’s behavior, and that can be linked with outcomes to the baby.” Psychologists who study infant mental health and the effects of domestic violence on children have long recognized this phenomenon, but it wasn’t until recently that it could be quantified. In 2009, Diane Benoit, a psychiatrist at the University of Toronto and the Hospital for Sick Children, developed a system for coding data from interviews with mothers for characteristics of disrupted representations. Ahlfs-Dunn was the first person in the United States to be trained in this system, by Benoit herself, and she’s applying it to a vast set of interviews conducted, from pregnancy to three years after birth, with more than 100 high- risk women from communities around Eastern.
“When you are trained in this coding scheme,” says Ahlfs-Dunn, “you learn to look really closely in these transcripts for key things like the mother laughing when talking about the baby being in distress, being really hostile and negative about the baby, or withdrawing or being helpless or fearful when the
10 Eastern | SPRING 2013
Illustration by Stacy Innerst
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