Gestational Weight Gain and Infant Affect at 6 months: Negative Emotionality and Affect-biased attention

• In Event: Prenatal Programming: Physiological and Neurodevelopmental Consequences

Abstract

Recent research suggests that maternal pre-pregnancy obesity is linked to offspring development beyond birth outcomes (Jenabi et al., 2019; Kong et al., 2020; Windham et al., 2019). However, less is known about the associations between gestational weight gain—independent of pre-pregnancy obesity—and offspring development. The current study investigates the relations between maternal pre-pregnancy BMI, gestational weight gain, offspring negative emotionality and affect-biased attention at 6 months. Participants were 155 mother-infant dyads enrolled in a longitudinal study during pregnancy. Pre-pregnancy BMI and gestational weight gain were obtained through medical records. At 6 months, mothers completed the Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised (IBQ-R), and infants completed a free-viewing eye-tracking task where a series of face pairs (happy vs. neutral, sad vs. neutral, angry vs. neutral) were presented on a screen. First, we examined the relations between parent-report negative emotionality and infant attention to emotional faces. Next, we examined the relations between pre-pregnancy BMI, gestational weight gain and infant outcomes. Overall, infants who were rated higher in negative emotionality spent less time looking at happy faces, r(74) = -.337, p = .003. Greater gestational weight gain predicted both lower parent-reported negative emotionality, r(153) = -.174, p = .03, and longer looking time at happy faces, r(74) = .321, p = .005. Pre-pregnancy BMI was not associated with negative emotionality or attention to emotional faces, p >.05. Our findings suggest that greater gestational weight gain predicts lower offspring negative emotionality and greater attention to happy faces at 6 months. Although this finding may be somewhat unexpected, one previous study found that greater gestational weight gain is associated with better cognitive performance in school-aged children (Gage et al., 2013). Additionally, a large amount of research on gestational weight gain and maternal and child health outcomes focused only on several birth outcomes such as mode of delivery and birth weight in the context of maternal obesity (Siega-Riz et al., 2020). It is unclear how gestational weight gain may be associated with dimensions of child development beyond birth. The current study suggests that greater gestational weight gain may be beneficial for early child development and there are potential differential effects of pre-pregnancy BMI and gestational weight gain on offspring development.

Authors

• Chen Su, University of Denver
  Presenting Author

• Ella-Marie P. Hennessey, University of Denver

• Danielle Swales, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Catherine Demers, University of Denver

• Jenalee Doom, University of Denver

• Camille Hoffman, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

• Benjamin Hankin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Elysia Poggi Davis, University of Denver