A mother ’s early life experiences of adversity can influence her baby’s sensitivity to stress

By Emma Young Over the past few decades, it’s become clear that experiences even before birth influence later psychological wellbeing. A mother’s stress levels during pregnancy have emerged as a key influence. Greater stress seems to programme her child to “expect” a difficult environment, and so to be more sensitive to potential threats — and more vulnerable to developing an anxiety disorder. It’s uncertain, though, whether adversity earlier in life affects stress levels during pregnancy, and so might impact the child’s sensitivity to stress. So Cassandra L. Hendrix at New York University and colleagues set out to investigate. For their study, reported in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, the team recruited 217 Black American mother-infant pairs from two hospitals in the Atlanta, Georgia area. To try to ensure a socioeconomically diverse sample, one hospital was public and the other private. At around the end of the first trimester, each woman reported on their perceived stress, anxiety and depression. The team combined their answers to generate single individual scores of early pregnancy prenatal distress. The women also reported on their lifetime experience of race-based discrimination, and on any traumas, such as abuse or divorce, during their childhood. When they were in their third trimester, they completed the stress, anxiety and depression questionnaires again, generating late pregnancy distress scores. After t...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Babies Emotion Source Type: blogs