3:56 p.m., Oct. 6, 2008----Johanna Bick, a psychology graduate student who since 2004 has studied mother-infant bonding in UD's Infant Caregiver Lab, was awarded the Ruth Kirschstein National Research Service Award late last month by the National Institute of Mental Health.

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The two-year grant, which entitles Bick to $37,000 for the first year of her research and $18,500 for the second year, will enable her to track mother-infant bonding factors in 50 foster mothers and infants throughout the Wilmington and Philadelphia metropolitan areas in order to predict healthy parenting bonds and offer intervention strategies, if needed, for those bonds that seem troubled.

“After earning my bachelor's degree, I spent a year researching adolescents and their relationships, and that was when I decided I was much more interested in young children who were at risk for developing problems later in life,” said Bick, who earned her bachelor's degree in psychology from Trinity University in Texas.

“When I took a subsequent job at the Kemp Center, a nonprofit for research, advocacy and treatment for abused and neglected children, I became fascinated in prevention and intervention efforts with infants,” she said. “I was working on a project that looked at the developmental trajectory of infants in foster care, and that led me to the work of Dr. Mary Dozier [Amy E. du Pont Chair in Child Development] here at the University.”

Bick, who was encouraged by Dozier, her adviser, to apply for the grant last spring, will conduct her research in the Infant Caregiver Lab, under the direction of Dozier, who developed the Attachment and Bio-behavioral Catch-up Intervention program used at the lab and deemed to be an effective means of identifying at-risk foster families in the past.

“[Dozier's] program fueled a lot of my research questions on what foster infants need,” Bick said, “because in my grant I'm asking, 'How can we predict who forms a good bond with these infants?' and 'How can I measure that?' and 'How do successful factors develop over the course of the bond?'”

To identify factors associated with healthy moms and predict, in turn, how to identify--and offer intervention measures for--bonds that aren't as strong, Bick will track, over the course of three months with each mother-infant pair, three different factors associated with good parenting.

Using the This Is My Baby interview questionnaire (also developed in Dozier's lab), Bick will note levels of commitment associated with positive mother-child relationships in foster families. She also will measure psycho-physiological correlates of bonding that will be assessed with event-related “tests,” such as rubrics that track the responses of mothers who are shown pictures of their infants. The last factor Bick will study are the neurobiological correlates of bonding, which involve the production of oxytocin, a hormone associated with parent-child bonding. Through periodic collection of urine samples, Bick will look at how this hormone changes over the course of the bond.

“There are several measureable factors associated with good parenting and bonding, but the larger question really is, 'Do these infants look better in the long term?'” said Bick, who emphasized that the ideal research study would be one where infant subjects were tracked at different points throughout their lives.

“Given that there are about 50,000 children--many of them infants--who are placed nationally each year in foster care, it's important to identify the infants who are at risk for a host of problems so that they can get the care they need early on,” Bick said. “Ultimately, the jumping-off point from this study would be to examine how the bond with these infants makes them do better in life.”

Article by Becca Hutchinson
Photo by Ambre Alexander