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EEG Frontal Alpha Asymmetry Moderates the Association between Maternal Prenatal Stress and Child Dysregulated Behaviors

Thu, April 8, 10:15 to 11:15am EDT (10:15 to 11:15am EDT), Virtual

Abstract

Pregnant mothers’ stress heightens risk for altered fetal neurodevelopment and associated emotion dysregulation in childhood (Kinsella & Monk, 2009). However, not all fetuses exposed to in utero stress will develop emotional dysregulation in childhood. Physiological indicators, including electroencephalogram (EEG) activity, may account for heterogeneous outcomes. Frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) – a measure based on the difference between activation of the right and left frontal cortex – may moderate the relationship between arousal and behavior, with left asymmetry usually predicting less dysregulation (Reznik & Allen, 2018). Accordingly, the current study examined maternal prenatal stress, child FAA, and their interaction as predictors of preschool-aged children’s emotionally dysregulated behaviors (EDB). Maternal prenatal stress was hypothesized to predict children’s EDB after controlling for cumulative risk and maternal engagement. Additionally, FAA was expected to moderate this association, such that left asymmetry would attenuate the link between maternal prenatal stress and children’s EDB .

Participants were 57 mother-child dyads recruited in a large city as part of a child development study. Mothers were predominantly African American (80.4%) or Caucasian (12.5%). 54.4% of children were male. At the prenatal visit, mothers reported their stress (PSS-10; Cohen, 1988), education, income, marital status, household composition, age of pregnancy, and address, used to determine the family’s census-based Childhood Opportunity Index score (Acevedo-Garcia et al., 2014). Sociodemographic factors were controlled by forming a cumulative risk index (Evans et al., 2013). During the 3-year visit, a videotaped dyadic free play session was coded for positive maternal engagement marked by on-task initiative and persistence, body position, vocalizations, and control . At the 5-year visit, mothers reported their child’s EDB using the dysregulation profile (Althoff et al., 2010) of the Child Behavior Checklist (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2001), and EEG data was collected during the computerized “Incredible Cake Task ” (Grabell et al., 2019) that exposed children to mild social-evaluative stressors. Average FAA (Smith et al., 2017) during two-second post-stimulus bins was calculated for negative feedback trials.

Hypotheses were partially supported. After controlling for cumulative risk and maternal engagement, prenatal maternal stress was a significant predictor of EDB (see Table 1). There was also a significant interaction between prenatal maternal stress and FAA (see Table 1 and Figure 1); however, the direction of the effect was contrary to expectation. Simple slopes analyses indicated that prenatal maternal stress was positively associated with EDB when FAA was high (+1 SD; i.e., left asymmetry), β = .58, p < .01. However, when FAA was low (-1 SD; i.e., right asymmetry), maternal prenatal stress and EDB were not significantly associated, β = .05, p = .75.

Results suggest that prenatal exposure to maternal stress is linked to child EDB five years later. Also, left asymmetry in response to stress appeared to exacerbate the deleterious effects of prenatal stress, which may be due to links between left asymmetry and anger and/or externalizing behaviors (Gatzke-Kopp et al., 2014). These findings emphasize the importance of interventions to reduce prenatal stress and suggest that future research should further probe links between left asymmetry and child regulation and dysregulation.

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