High Impact Practices Student Showcase Spring 2025

The Weight of Waking: The Relationship Between Postpartum Mental Health and Infant Sleep

The Weight of Waking: The Relationship Between Postpartum Mental Health and Infant Sleep

Streaming Media

Course Code

STA

Course Number

4164

Faculty/Instructor

Nathaniel Simone

Faculty/Instructor Email

nathaniel.simone@ucf.edu

About the Author

My name is Casey Courtright and I’m a clinical psychology major with a minor in statistics. I am interested in learning more about the intersections between psychology and sociology, which is what leads me into my project, “The Weight of Waking: The Relationship Between Postpartum Mental Health and Infant Sleep”.

Abstract, Summary, or Creative Statement

This study explored which factors act alongside maternal mental health to predict how often their infants awoke at night. More specifically, this project aimed to determine if education level interacted with postpartum mental health symptoms to predict awakenings. A multiple linear regression model was developed using a dataset on 410 new mothers from Switzerland. The data contained information on the mothers’ recent symptoms of several mental health conditions as well as their infants’ sleep quality. Despite finding a statistically significant model, it did not account for much of the pattern in infant sleep awakenings. Future research should include mothers from countries with more pronounced socioeconomic inequality to gain a more diverse perspective on the effects of socioeconomic status on maternal mental health and infant sleep. Through this project, I learned more about how complex human behavior is and the limitations of using linear models.

Keywords

postpartum; mothers; infant; sleep; depression; anxiety; PTSD; education

The Weight of Waking: The Relationship Between Postpartum Mental Health and Infant Sleep


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