People & context · Helping someone else
Randomised experiment Cause and effect
A mother's stress showed up in her baby's body
Among mothers and their infants, when mothers were randomly assigned to a negatively evaluated stress task rather than a positive or no-evaluation task, the pair's physiological responses moved together more after reunion, increasingly over time, as found using a randomised laboratory experiment.
Details
- Who was studied
- Mothers and infants
- Observation window
- One session
- What was measured
- Physiological responses of mother and infant
- What this establishes
- Cause and effect, in this setting
Limits: Sample size and infant ages are not given in the abstract.
What it does not show: This establishes that stress can pass between people without words, but not how this works in adult relationships.
Relationship to Calmistry
Helping someone else can mean carrying their stress. Porosity is Calmistry's construct for that openness; it has not been tested against physiology.
Calmistry hypothesis · not yet tested in Calmistry's own instrument
Checked against the original on 2026-10-08 · DOI 10.1177/0956797613518352 · PMID 24482403
Waters, West & Mendes (2014), Psychological Science · Original publication