Poster #60 - Pregnant Women’s Adverse Childhood Experiences, Stress, and Psychopathology, and their Attributions About Their Unborn Child

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Developmental Psychopathology

Integrative Statement

Understanding parents’ expressed emotion (EE) about children is vital to understanding how parenting behaviors affect children's risk or resilience, because EE predicts both parenting and child adjustment difficulty (McCarty et al., 2004; Peris et al., 2003). In low-income families, higher maternal warmth is associated with more positive and effective parenting practices, and high negativity with worse child adjustment (Narayan et al., 2012). However, studies haven’t examined EE toward the unborn child and its predictors among low-income pregnant women.
This study investigated predictors of prenatal maternal EE (specifically warmth and negativity; Caspi et al., 2004), including maternal childhood adversity, and current stress and psychopathology during pregnancy. It was hypothesized that elevated childhood adversity, psychopathology symptoms, (depression and PTSD), and stress, and ACEs would predict more negative and less warm EE, reflecting less positive attributions about the unborn baby. It was also expected that prenatal warmth and negativity would be mostly independent of one another (Wade et al., 2011). Thus, an exploratory third aim examined whether groups of mothers who expressed high rates of both warmth and negativity differed significantly on levels of childhood adversity and current psychopathology and stress compared to those who scored high on one type of EE, or low on both.
Participants were 101 women (M = 29.10, SD = 6.56, range = 18-44 years) interviewed in the second (47%) or third (53%) trimester of pregnancy. The sample was diverse (37% Latina, 22% White, 20% African-American, 21% biracial/other) and mostly characterized by low monthly income (M = $1,588.54, SD = $1,298.47, range = $0-6,000). Participants completed the Five Minute Speech Sample (FMSS; Magaña et al., 1986) about their baby and responses were coded for negative and warm EE. Participants reported on childhood adversity (maltreatment and family dysfunction) from the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs; CDC, 2016) scale, and completed standardized questionnaires on depression symptoms (EPDS; Cox et al., 1987), PTSD symptoms (PCL-5, Weathers et al., 2013), and stress (Perceived Stress Scale; Cohen et al., 1983) during pregnancy.
Bivariate correlations showed that that higher maternal family dysfunction was the only indicator of adversity, psychopathology, or stress associated with maternal EE. Specifically, higher maternal family dysfunction was significantly associated with higher levels of maternal warmth (r = .24, p < .05). However, cluster analyses with warmth and negativity as indicators revealed three distinct groups of mothers (Figure 1): MIXED (high negativity and warmth), WARM (high warmth, low negativity), and FLAT (low warmth and negativity), and these groups differed on mean levels of childhood adversity (but not psychopathology or stress). Specifically, MIXED mothers reported significantly more total ACEs than FLAT mothers, while MIXED and WARM reported significantly more family dysfunction than FLAT mothers (Figure 2).
Findings suggest that types of maternal childhood adversity may relate to higher warmth about unborn babies. Childhood adversity may represent a risk-activated protective pathway (Masten, 2001), whereby mothers with higher family dysfunction may in turn have warmer EE, reflecting more positive prenatal attributions. Associations are preliminary and cross-sectional, so future studies should investigate these pathways longitudinally.

Authors

• Madison Schmidt, University of Denver
  Presenting Author

• Angela J. Narayan, University of Denver
  Non-Presenting Author

• Luisa Rivera, Emory University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alicia F. Lieberman, University of California, San Francisco
  Non-Presenting Author