| The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of prenatal maternal cocaine-use upon Reflective Functioning (RF) within the context of the parent-child relationship. RF refers to the capacity to reflect upon a wide range of emotions experienced by both self and other. Within the context of parenting, RF refers to a parent's capacity to put herself in her child's mind, try to imagine her child's experience, and use this understanding to guide her emotional response to her child. There is now ample neuropsychological research to suggest that both executive functions and the ability to regulate affect are impaired in women who use cocaine as their drug of choice. There is also some neurobiological evidence to suggest that cocaine co-opts certain biologically-produced behaviors that are intimately involved in the building of human relationships and essential for the development of the parent-child bond. The aim of this study was to explore the impact of these affective, cognitive, and biological impairments produced by cocaine upon RF. It was hypothesized that RF in cocaine-using women would be significantly impaired as compared to RF in non-cocaine-using women. Furthermore, it was hypothesized that cocaine-using women would respond to questions on the PDI in more consistently concrete, unelaborated ways, with almost no glimmers of reflection. Their individual profiles would show little evidence of the fluctuations in RF that one normally sees across responses to different situations, even among parents who score quite low along the RF scale. 46 mothers were interviewed using the PDI (Aber et al, 1985), half of whom had used cocaine prenatally and half of whom had not. Their children were between four and seven years of age at the time of the interview. Cocaine-using women had significantly lower overall RF scores than did non cocaine-using women, confirming the first hypothesis. The second hypothesis was not confirmed. These results suggest that cocaine-use negatively affects RF through its impairment upon affect regulatory systems. This model is elaborated to include external risk factors as potentially mediating the negative consequences of cocaine upon RF. The clinical implications of these findings are discussed. |
