Poster #212 - Pregnant Women’s Self-Reported Emotion Dysregulation Predicts Newborn Neurobehavior

• In Event: 1-061 - Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Background: A pregnant woman’s emotion regulation difficulties are a known risk factor for fetal development (e.g., Glover & O’Connor, 2002). Maternal emotion regulation problems during pregnancy predict behavioral concerns (e.g., stress signs, negative affect) in infants, and this effect likely occurs through maternal physiological responses (e.g., Davis et al., 2007; Field, Diego, Jones, & Hernandez-Reif, 2006). Thus, emotion dysregulation (ED), a multifaceted construct with implications for psychopathology risk (e.g., Beauchaine, 2015), may be transmitted across generations through in utero exposure. Yet, few studies have examined an intergenerational transmission of ED, despite its relevance for developmental psychopathology. Neurobehavioral measures may allow one to examine emerging signs of newborn ED. Even so, no studies to date have attempted to use such a measure to characterize early signs of ED in newborns.
Hypotheses: We hypothesized that greater maternal ED would predict reduced newborn neurobehavioral regulation and more stress signs. That is, greater maternal ED would associate with greater newborn arousal, excitability, and stress, along with reduced self-regulation.
Methods: We enrolled 144 third-trimester pregnant women with a range of scores on a self-report measure of ED—the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS; Gratz & Roemer, 2004). Participants were 28.8 years old on average (SD = 5.1), 66.7% identified as White/Caucasian (12.3% Asian, 5.1% American Indian or Alaskan Native, 2.9% Black/African American, 0.7% Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, 12.3% Other), and 71.3% identified as Hispanic/Latina. Shortly after birth, we administered the NICU Newborn Neurobehavioral Scale (NNNS; Lester, Tronick, & Brazelton, 2004) to newborns (current n = 127). Data collection is ongoing with an anticipated N = 162 (pregnant women and newborns). To examine preliminary data, we ran Pearson correlations between DERS subscales and NNNS summary scores. We then conducted a Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to reduce NNNS data and ran standard linear regressions with DERS subscales.
Results: The mean DERS score was 75.8 (SD = 24.2), ranging from 36 to 148. In general, DERS scores had few associations with individual NNNS scores, though higher DERS scores predicted greater newborn physiological stress, poorer handling, and greater lethargy (Table 1). Another focus of this study was to reduce NNNS scores empirically, to capture components related to emerging ED. Our PCA showed that the NNNS could be reduced to two components (Table 2), explaining 70.7% of score variance. With these components, we found one significant association: DERS – Strategies was associated with lower scores on the NNNS Attention component (B = -0.03, ß = -0.20, p = .031, R^2 = .04). That is, limited access to regulation strategies in pregnant women predicted lower attention and greater lethargy in their newborns.
Discussion: Results support our overarching prediction that maternal states during pregnancy can predict newborn neurobehavior. As limited access to effective emotion regulation strategies may predict psychopathology in women (e.g., Blalock and Joiner, 2000), it could be the use of regulation strategies is one mechanism for the intergenerational transmission of risk. These results suggest that fetal programming may occur at least in part as a function of maternal ED.

Authors

• Robert Dennis Vlisides-Henry, University of Utah
  Presenting Author

• Brendan Ostlund, University of Utah
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sarah Terrell, University of Utah
  Non-Presenting Author

• Mindy Brown, University of Utah
  Non-Presenting Author

• Elisabeth Conradt, University of Utah
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sheila Crowell, University of Utah
  Non-Presenting Author