Poster #2 - Maternal Pregnancy-Related Anxiety Predicts Infant Affect-Biased Attention at 6 Months

• In Event: Poster Session 19

Abstract

Fetal development progresses incredibly rapidly, far exceeding the rate at which development occurs during any other period of the lifespan. For example, nearly 200 billion neurons are produced prior to the 3rd trimester of pregnancy (Bourgeois, 1997), and there is a 21-fold increase in grey matter volume from the 2nd trimester to term (Andescavage et al., 2017). Given the rapid pace of fetal development, the fetal brain is thus highly susceptible to perturbations in the uterine environment, which can have lasting consequences for postnatal outcomes (Monk et al., 2019; Hicks et al., 2019). Indeed, the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) or Fetal Programming hypothesis suggests that the prenatal period is a sensitive window during which the environment can have an immense impact upon the development of fetal systems (Gluckman & Hansen, 2004; Barker, 1990). Maternal anxiety during pregnancy is relatively common (Dennis et al., 2017), and has emerged as a particularly influential pathway through which offspring development may be affected (Davis & Sandman, 2012; Dunkel Schetter & Tanner, 2012). Specifically, prenatal maternal anxiety has been linked to difficulties in offspring emotion regulation, a risk factor in the development of internalizing and externalizing problems (Aldao et al., 2016). Examining the relation between prenatal anxiety and the early developing components of emotion regulation, such as attentional biases for emotional stimuli, may provide insight into the underlying mechanisms through which the development of emotional and behavioral problems can occur. The current study thus examines whether prenatal maternal state anxiety or pregnancy-related anxiety relate to infant affect-biased attention at 6 months in a sample of 86 infants. Infant attentional biases were measured using an eye-tracking task during which a series of face pairs were presented (happy, angry, or sad face paired with a neutral face); outcome measures included attention orienting (latency to faces) and attention holding (total looking time). Overall, infants exposed to higher pregnancy-related anxiety, but not prenatal maternal state anxiety, spent less time looking at both emotional and neutral faces, after covarying for maternal cohabitation status and postnatal anxiety [F(1,81) = 6.374, p = .014, partial η2 = .073]. Neither prenatal maternal state anxiety nor pregnancy-related anxiety related to infant attention orienting; results did not differ by sex or timing of exposure during pregnancy. These findings suggest that higher maternal pregnancy-related anxiety predicts differences in infants’ sustained attention, highlighting the importance of the prenatal period in the development of early emotion regulation and providing insight into the underlying mechanisms through which development of emotional and behavioral problems may occur.

Authors

• Ella-Marie P. Hennessey, University of Denver
  Presenting Author

• Danielle Swales, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Julie Markant, Tulane University

• Camille Hoffman, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

• Benjamin Hankin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Elysia Poggi Davis, University of Denver