Mobile Device Assessment of Postpartum Depression's Effect on Maternal-Infant Dyadic Interaction and Child Emotion Regulation

The training and research plans described in this K23 Career Development Award will enable Dr. Kunmi Sobowale to achieve his long-term career goal of becoming an independently-funded investigator using mobile device technologies to facilitate screening, risk stratification, and personalized prevention and treatment for perinatal and infant mental health. To accomplish this goal, Dr. Sobowale aims to 1) Develop proficiency in the design of longitudinal studies and the statistical methods and skills to process and analyze intensive longitudinal data with a focus on mobile technologies; 2) Develop competence in signal processing and the methods of feature selection, and in particular the application of these methods to speech acoustic analysis; 3) Develop skills in research methods to assess the parent-child interaction and emotion regulation in early childhood. UCLA provides a rich environment for this training plan with a combination of didactic support and hands-on mentorship from leaders in depression neurobehavioral phenotyping, longitudinal study design and analysis, mobile health research, and child socioemotional development as well as the caregiver-child interaction in clinical and non-clinical populations. The training goals will be supported by and applied to the proposed research study. The objective of this longitudinal study of mother-infant dyads is to use mobile sensing devices (audio recorders and Bluetooth sensors) to enable daylong naturalistic assessment of the mother-child interaction. The focus will be mother-infant conversational turns, a key indicator of interaction quality, that are negatively affected by postpartum depression. The study will examine, in turn, how conversational turns affect child emotion regulation and, finally, will explore whether conversational turns are associated with mother-infant co-regulation and relationship quality. Aim 1 of this prospective longitudinal study investigates whether maternal postpartum depressive symptoms at 6 weeks are associated with conversational turn consistency at 3 and 6 months postpartum. Aim 2 examines whether conversational turn consistency at 3 and 6 months is associated with mother-reported child emotion regulation and whether it moderates the effectiveness of infant use of regulation strategies on distress (i.e., emotion regulation) during the still-face paradigm at 6 months postpartum. Aim 3 examines the association between conversational turn consistency at 3 and 6 months with observed mother-child co-regulation (mother-infant affect matches during the still-face paradigm) and mother-reported relationship quality at 6 months. This proposal is aligned with the National Institutes of Mental Health Strategic Objective to develop and assess novel mobile technology and digital health tools to enable objective measurement of behavior and intervention effects on symptom expression and functional outcomes in naturalistic environments. Ultimately, this sensor-based approach will facilitate large-scale assessment of the maternal-child interaction for screening and risk stratification and inform parent-child interventions for mother-infant dyads in the context of maternal postpartum depression. Project Number: 1K23MH143091-01 | Fiscal Year: 2026 | NIH Institute/Center: National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) | Principal Investigator: Kunmi Sobowale | Institution: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES, LOS ANGELES, CA | Award Amount: $196,992 | Activity Code: K23 | Study Section: Special Emphasis Panel[ZRG1 SCIL-X (50)] View on NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/11283882