Infants’ expectations about caregivers’ comforting behavior and associations with maternal depressive symptoms at 6, 9, and 12 months.

We examined infants' expectations about caregivers' comforting behavior at 6, 9, and 12 months and assessed associations with maternal depressive symptoms. One hundred thirteen infants (47% female; 72% White, 13% Asian, 6% Black, 6% Latinx, 3% more than one race) and their mothers participated at one or more time points. In a violation-of-expectation task, infants watched video vignettes in which a caregiver either interrupted her household chore to comfort a crying baby (comfort event) or continued her work and ignored the baby (ignore event). Infants' looking times were coded offline. Mothers reported on their depressive symptoms. Bootstrapped analyses of variance indicated that infants, on average, looked longer at the ignore than at the comfort event, suggesting that they expected the caregiver to engage in comforting behavior. Path analyses revealed concurrent associations, such that higher levels of maternal depressive symptoms at a given time point predicted lower expectations about comforting behavior at the same time point. The magnitude of these associations did not differ by time point. In sum, our results contribute to a growing literature on infants' expectations about caregiving and provide the first evidence for maternal depressive symptoms as a concurrent predictor of poorer performance on a laboratory task assessing infants' expectations about caregivers' comforting behavior. Two possible mechanisms for this association are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).