Neonatal striatal volume is associated with infant anhedonia.

Anhedonia is increasingly recognized as a transdiagnostic risk factor for psychopathology. New evidence demonstrates that anhedonia is present in infancy and early childhood. Structural variability in striatal regions involved in reward processing and pleasure seeking is concurrently linked to anhedonia, yet few studies have examined whether striatal differences presage anhedonia, and none have examined prospective associations before middle childhood.

Infant hedonic/anhedonic processing index (HAPI-Infant): Assessing infant anhedonia and its prospective association with adolescent depressive symptoms.

Background: Anhedonia, an impairment in the motivation for or experience of pleasure, is a well-established transdiagnostic harbinger and core symptom of mental illness. Given increasing recognition of early life origins of mental illness, we posit that anhedonia should, and could, be recognized earlier if appropriate tools were available. However, reliable diagnostic instruments prior to childhood do not currently exist.

Differential effects of semantic distance, distractor salience, and relations in verbal analogy.

Prior studies of A:B::C:D verbal analogies have identified several factors that affect performance, including the semantic similarity between source and target domains (semantic distance), the semantic association between the C-term and incorrect answers (distracter salience), and the type of relations between word pairs. However, it is unclear how these stimulus properties affect performance when utilized together. To test their interactive effects, we created a verbal analogy stimulus set that factorially crossed these factors and presented participants with an analogical stem (A:B::C:?) with two response choices: an analogically correct (D) and incorrect distracter (D') term.

Patterns of Maternal Distress from Pregnancy Through Childhood Predict Psychopathology During Early Adolescence.

Capitalizing on a longitudinal cohort followed from gestation through adolescence (201 mother-child dyads), we investigate the contributions of severity and stability of both maternal depressive and perceived stress symptoms to adolescent psychopathology. Maternal depressive and perceived stress trajectories from pregnancy through adolescence were identified with latent class growth analyses, and associations with adolescent internalizing and externalizing symptoms were examined. For both depression and stress, the most common trajectory group comprised mothers displaying stable and low symptom levels over time, and adolescents of these mothers had the fewest internalizing and externalizing symptoms.

Maternal prenatal cortisol programs the infant hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.

One of the key proposed agents of fetal programming is exposure to maternal glucocorticoids. Experimental animal studies provide evidence that prenatal exposure to elevated maternal glucocorticoids has consequences for hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis functioning in the offspring. There are very few direct tests of maternal glucocorticoids, such as cortisol, during human pregnancy and associations with infant cortisol reactivity.

Maternal prenatal anxiety trajectories and infant developmental outcomes in one-year-old offspring.

A longitudinal study of a sample of women and their offspring from two urban areas (N = 233) was conducted to test whether maternal prenatal anxiety trajectories from early to late pregnancy are associated with 12-month infant developmental outcomes, independent of maternal postpartum anxiety symptoms, prenatal and postpartum depressive symptoms, parity, birth outcomes and maternal education. Three types of maternal anxiety trajectories over the course of pregnancy were identified and labeled increasing, decreasing, and stable-low. Only increasing maternal prenatal anxiety was associated with 12-month infant outcomes, specifically lower Bayley-III scores on receptive language and gross motor skills.

Maternal immune markers during pregnancy and child neurodevelopmental outcomes at age 20 months in the Seychelles Child Development Study.

Immune dysregulation during pregnancy may influence behavior and neurodevelopment in offspring, but few human studies have tested this hypothesis. Using structural equation modeling, we examined associations between maternal inflammatory markers at 28 weeks gestation and child neurodevelopmental outcomes at 20 months of age in a sample of 1453 mother-child pairs. We observed several associations between maternal inflammatory markers measured in the late second or early third trimester and child neurodevelopmental outcomes.

Maternal postpartum stress and toddler developmental delays: Results from a multisite study of racially diverse families.

Maternal psychosocial stress during pregnancy can adversely influence child development, but few studies have investigated psychosocial stress during the postpartum period and its association with risk of toddler developmental delays. Moreover, given the expanding diversity of the U.S.

Maternal Gestational Immune Response and Autism Spectrum Disorder Phenotypes at 7 Years of Age in the Seychelles Child Development Study.

Findings from observational and experimental studies suggest that maternal inflammation during pregnancy is associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We report the first study in humans to examine this association in a large prospective birth cohort. We studied 788 mother-child pairs from the Seychelles Child Development Study Nutrition Cohort 2.

ASSOCIATIONS BETWEEN EARLY MATERNAL DEPRESSIVE SYMPTOM TRAJECTORIES AND TODDLERS' FELT SECURITY AT 18 MONTHS: ARE BOYS AND GIRLS AT DIFFERENTIAL RISK?

The goal of this study was to evaluate whether there are sex differences in children's vulnerability to caregiving risk, as indexed by trajectories of maternal depressive symptoms assessed from 2 to 18 months' postpartum, and children's rated attachment security in toddlerhood, adjusting for maternal social support and demographic risk. Analyses utilized longitudinal data collected for 182 African American mother-child dyads from economically diverse backgrounds. Participants were recruited at the time of the child's birth and followed to 18 months' postpartum.

Positive predictors of quality of life for postpartum mothers with a history of childhood maltreatment.

The postpartum period brings a host of biopsychosocial, familial, and economic changes, which may be challenging for new mothers, especially those with trauma histories. Trauma-exposed women are at heightened risk for psychiatric symptomatology and reduced quality of life. The current study sought to evaluate whether a set of hypothesized promotive factors assessed during the first 18 months postpartum (positive parenting, family cohesion, and maternal resilience) are associated with life satisfaction in this population, after controlling for income and postpartum psychiatric symptoms.

Maternal reflective functioning among mothers with childhood maltreatment histories: links to sensitive parenting and infant attachment security.

This study examined relationships among maternal reflective functioning, parenting, infant attachment, and demographic risk in a relatively large (N = 83) socioeconomically diverse sample of women with and without a history of childhood maltreatment and their infants. Most prior research on parental reflective functioning has utilized small homogenous samples. Reflective functioning was assessed with the Parent Development Interview, parenting was coded from videotaped mother-child interactions, and infant attachment was evaluated in Ainsworth's Strange Situation by independent teams of reliable coders masked to maternal history.