Early Relational Health RCT

In response to the clinically observed mother-infant disconnect during the pandemic, COMBO started a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) in the Newborn Medicine Section at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital to test whether an evidence-based intervention designed to support parent/caregiver-infant emotional expression promotes ERH and other infant outcomes. 

While existing studies prioritize a single, unidirectional construct of relational health (e.g., attachment, which is child-to-parent, or bonding, which is parent-to-child), our COMBO initiative is the first longitudinal cohort to build a taxonomy of all known components of early relationships and evaluate how each maps onto future child outcomes. This RCT is a step toward a mechanistic understanding of the dyadic (bidirectional) concept of emotional connection, and what comes out of dyadic parent-child interactions. 

Participants complete most time points in the protocol via remote video visits, and the center’s highly skilled teams code these interactions using cutting-edge techniques — in fact, COMBO’s innovative work on human behavioral coding and social connectedness attracts trainees from within and outside the United States to learn video coding specifically for emotional connection and related coding schema. 

The center’s immediate targets for additional interventions include infant sleep, dyadic, data-driven hypothesis generation, behavioral and environmental predictability, and biomarker identification.