Mothers stress rollercoaster while pregnant linked to negative emotions in babies: Fluctuations in prenatal stress linked to three-month-olds tendency to experience, express negative emotions
Pregnant people who had bigger fluctuations in stress from one moment to the next — also called lability — had infants with more fear, sadness and distress at three months old than mothers with less stress variability, reports a new Northwestern University study that examined how a child’s developmental trajectory begins even before birth.
Prior research has found that mothers’ distress during pregnancy has been related to infant temperament and behavior, but this is one of the first studies to measure mothers’ experience of stress in real time on many occasions, which enables a closer look at whether changes in mothers’ stress across pregnancy matter for infant development.
The study will be published Sept. 7 in the journal Infancy.
“Research often examines stress as a static, unchanging construct — one that is either high or low, present or absent — but most of us have a lot of ebbs and flows in our stress depending on what is going on around us,” said lead study author Leigha MacNeill, research assistant professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a member of the Northwestern Institute for Innovations in Developmental Sciences (DevSci).
“That variability is inherent in our daily lives, so this lability is capturing an important aspect of stress and offers insight into how to measure stress going forward. This is of particular importance as we work to closely capture the maternal-fetal environment as it relates to how babies develop over time.”
For instance, one mother who has consistent levels of stress over pregnancy and another mother who moves between very low and very high levels of stress over pregnancy may in the end have a similar average level of stress across that time, but that average may not best capture meaningful differences in what the fetus is exposed to, MacNeill explained.
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