Babies shown affection 'cope better with stress when older'

Nurturing and warmth in early life has "long-lasting positive effects on mental health well into adulthood", they said.

While several pieces of research have sought to assess the impact of a mother's affection, they have been based on people recollecting their own experiences.

The latest study involved psychologists assessing interactions between mothers and their offspring when the babies were eight months old.

Mothers were analysed to see how well they coped with their child's developmental tests and how they responded to their child's performance.

The psychologists ranked levels of affection from negative or occasionally negative to warm, caressing or extravagant.

The mother's affection was then categorised: low (combining negative and occasionally negative), normal (warm) and high (caressing and extravagant).

Overall, one in 10 mother-child interactions showed low levels of maternal affection, 85 per cent showed normal levels and six per cent showed very high levels.

Some 482 of the children were then followed up until age 34 on average, and their reactions to different types of distress analysed. These included stress, hostility and anger, sensitivity and anxiety, and participants were ranked on a scale from not at all distressed by the symptom to extremely distressed.

The group was also asked whether they thought their mothers had been affectionate towards them. Children whose mothers gave them lots of affection handled all types of distress better, the results showed.

The experts, from North Carolina, Massachusetts and Rhode Island in the USA, published their findings in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.