The relationship of temperament and character features of dyadic adjustment, emotion regulation strategies, and infant temperament with postpartum depression in 3-12 months-old infants' mothers

In this study, the relationship of temperament and character features of the 3-12 months-old infants' mothers, their perceived dyadic adjustment, emotion regulation strategies, and infants' temperament with postpartum depression was investigated. Three hundred and fifty-seven mothers from various provinces of Turkey participated in the research voluntarily. Mothers filled out the Demographic Form, the Edingburgh Postpartum Depression Scale, the Adult Temperament Questionnaire, the Infant Behavior Questionnaire, the Dyadic Adjustment Scale, and the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire. First of all, reliability and validity study of the Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Very Short Form's was conducted within the scope of this research. Then, in order to test the main hypothesis of the research, correlation analysis, multiple regression analysis, t-test, analysis of variance, and mediation analysis was used. The findings have shown that postpartum depression was predicted by negative affect, effortful control and extraversion/surgency factors of mother temperament features, negative affect factor of infant temperament features, satisfaction and cohesion factors of dyadic adjustment variables and reappraisal from emotion regulation strategies. Additionally the indirect effect of mother's negative affect, effortful control and extraversion/surgency, infant's negative affect and dyadic adjustment variables on postpartum depression was explored by the mediator role of reappraisal as an emotion regulation. Findings of the study were discussed in the context of the releavent literature. Keywords: Postpartum Depression, Adult Temperament, Infant Temperament, Dyadic Adjustment, Emotion Regulation.