RESUMO
Introduction: Motherese, or emotional infant directed speech (IDS), is the specific form of speech used by parents to address their infants. The prosody of IDS has affective properties, expresses caregiver involvement, is a marker of caregiver-infant interaction quality. IDS prosodic characteristics can be detected with automatic analysis. We aimed to explore whether pregnant women "speak" to their unborn baby, whether they use motherese while speaking and whether anxio-depressive or obstetrical status impacts speaking to the fetus. Participants and Methods: We conducted an observational study of pregnant women with gestational ages from 26 to 38 weeks. Women were recruited in a university hospital department of obstetrics. Thirty-five women agreed to participate in the study, and 26 audio records were exploitable. We collected obstetrical and sociodemographic data, pregnancy outcomes, anxiety and depressive status using the Covy and Raskin Scales, and life events using the Sensations During Pregnancy and Life Event Questionnaire. Each participant was left alone with an audio recorder with a recommendation to feel free to speak to her fetus as she would have done at home. The recording was stopped after 3 min. Audio recordings were analyzed by two methods: psycholinguist experts' annotation and computational objective automatic analyses. Results: Most mothers (89%) reported speaking to their fetuses. We found a correlation between maternal first perceptions of fetal movements and the start of mother's speaking to fetus. Motherese prosody was detected with both annotation and automatic analysis with a significant correlation between the two methods. In this exploratory study, motherese use was not associated with maternal anxiodepressive or obstetrical status. However, the more future mothers were depressed, the less they spoke with their fetuses during the recording. Conclusion: Fetal directed speech (FDS) can be detected during pregnancy, and it contains a period of prosody that shares the same characteristics of motherese that can be described as prenatal motherese or emotional fetal-directed speech (e-FDS). This means that pregnant women start using motherese much earlier than expected. FDS seems to be correlated with maternal first perceptions of fetal movements and depression scores. However, more research is needed to confirm these exploratory results.
RESUMO
BACKGROUND: Suicide is the second most common cause of preventable mortality among Brazilian and French adolescents. The aim of the current study was to compare the main risk and protective factors associated with a suicide attempt (SA) and to highlight differences based on geographical characteristics. METHOD: We compared a Brazilian sample (N = 45) of adolescents admitted to the emergency room of a public hospital in São Paulo for SA to a French sample (N = 320) of adolescents hospitalized for SA across 5 paediatric departments. Then, we ran several multivariate models to examine how each selected variable was related to geographic origin and to the other selected variables linked to geographic origin. RESULTS: The two samples presented no significant differences regarding gender, age or schooling. Both samples had high rates of depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, substance use, disruptive disorders, borderline psychopathology, and lifetime SAs. However, the Brazilian sample presented significantly higher levels of psychopathology and had more insecure attachment relationships (fearful and detached), whereas the French sample had a more secure attachment style. Brazilian adolescents had more recourse to spiritual beliefs and spiritual support, whereas the French adolescents had higher scores on the Reasons for Living Inventory and used more help-seeking strategies from their social network, mainly close friends. Multivariate models showed that two productive coping strategies (seeking spiritual support and social action) and the dependence score were significantly associated with membership in the Brazilian cohort, whereas a secure attachment style and depression severity (evaluated by the Beck Depression Inventory) were significantly associated with membership in the French cohort. CONCLUSION: Despite presenting similar psychopathologies, Brazilian adolescents presented a more insecure attachment style and used the religious kind of coping more commonly than their French counterparts. We hypothesize that religion may compensate for the social vulnerabilities present in a middle-income country such as Brazil. More transcultural studies may help to elucidate this phenomenon.