Stress responses of infants and mothers to a still-face paradigm after traumatic childbirth.

Introduction: One-third of women experience childbirth as traumatic and some develop symptoms of childbirth-related posttraumatic stress symptoms (CB-PTSD symptoms). Whether CB-PTSD symptoms negatively impact on physiological and psychological stress responses in mothers and their offspring and whether they are associated with mother-infant synchrony is not clear. This study aimed to investigate stress responses of (1) mothers with CB-PTSS, (2) of their infant, and (3) the physiological mother-child-synchrony at six months postpartum.