International Projects

🇧🇷 Brazil — 2019 Rio Grande Birth Cohort

The 2019 Rio Grande Birth Cohort is a population-based longitudinal study in Southern Brazil investigating the life course epidemiology of mental health and its intergenerational transmission. Established in 2019, it has tracked over 1,000 mother-child dyads through the COVID-19 pandemic to examine how social inequalities, gender dynamics, and early-life adversity shape developmental trajectories. The cohort maintains a rigorous focus on maternal depression, anxiety, and stress, alongside child developmental milestones and behavioural outcomes. A central theme is the role of parenting and the home environment as modifiable factors in child development. 

Recognising that family dynamics are multi-dimensional, new follow-up waves starting in 2025 are expanding to include fathers. This includes surveying paternal mental health, parenting attitudes, and sex-equitable norms to build a more comprehensive picture of the family system. 

Within this larger framework, we conduct a specialised substudy utilising head-mounted wearable cameras to capture first-person perspectives of mother-child interactions at home. We use synchronised video data analysed through AI-powered software (Noldus FaceReader and Observer XT) to perform real-time emotional analysis. By capturing facial expressions, vocalisations, and physical synchrony, we aim to uncover the specific “relational signatures” that influence child mental health, providing a deeper understanding of “how” maternal context shapes development beyond traditional self-report measures.