Prenatal and postpartum depression are highly prevalent worldwide, and emerging evidence suggests they contribute to impairments in children's executive functions. Studies of maternal depression, however, have focused on the postpartum and postnatal periods with relatively less consideration of prenatal influences on child development. This study…

Emerging evidence suggests that prenatal stress does not solely undermine child functioning but increases developmental plasticity to both negative and positive postnatal experiences. Here we test this proposition using the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort study while implementing an extreme-group (i.e., high vs. low prenatal stress) design (n =…

This study examines interactions of heritable influences, prenatal substance use, and postnatal parental warmth and hostility on the development of conduct problems in middle childhood for boys and girls. Participants are 561 linked families, collected in 2 cohorts, including birth parents, adoptive parents, and adopted children. Heritable…

Fetal exposure to prenatal maternal stress can have lifelong consequences, with different types of maternal stress associated with different areas of child development. Fewer studies have focused on motor skills, even though they are strongly predictive of later development across a range of domains. Research on mechanisms of transmission has…

Emotion regulation is essential to cognitive, social, and emotional development and difficulties with emotion regulation portend future socioemotional, academic, and behavioral difficulties. There is growing awareness that many developmental outcomes previously thought to begin their development in the postnatal period have their origins in the…

Clinically meaningful behavior problems are thought to be present beginning in the early toddler years, yet few studies have investigated correlates of behavior problems assessed before age 2 years. The current study investigated the direct and interactive contributions of early infant and caregiver characteristics thought to play an important…

The concept of fetal programming is based on the idea that the developmental trajectory of infants is adjusted in response to in utero conditions. In species with extended parental care, these prenatally derived tendencies are further substantiated by behavioral attributes of the mother during the postnatal period. We investigated the stability of…

Our goal in the present study was to examine the effects of maternal smoking during pregnancy on infant self-regulation, exploring birth weight as a mediator and sex as a moderator of risk. A prospective sample of 218 infants was assessed at 6 months of age. Infants completed a battery of tasks assessing working memory/inhibition, attention, and…

Smoking during pregnancy is a persistent public health problem that has been linked to later adverse outcomes. The neonatal period--the first month of life--carries substantial developmental change in regulatory skills and is the period when tobacco metabolites are cleared physiologically. Studies to date mostly have used cross-sectional designs…

The authors investigated whether adversity in a female, before she conceives, will influence the affective and social behavior of her progeny. Virgin female rats were either undisturbed (controls) or exposed to varied, unpredictable, stressors for 7 days (preconceptual stress [PCS]) and then either mated immediately after the end of the stress…

Longitudinal neurobehavioral development was examined in 237 fetuses of low-risk pregnancies from 2 distinct populations-Baltimore, Maryland, and Lima, Peru-at 20, 24, 28, 32, 36, and 38 weeks gestation. Data were based on digitized Doppler-based fetal heart rate (FHR) and fetal movement (FM). In both groups, FHR declined while variability,…

Investigated associations between maternal psychological and fetal neurobehavioral functioning with data provided at 24, 30, and 36 weeks gestation. Found that fetuses of women who were more affectively intense, appraised their lives as more stressful, and reported more pregnancy-specific hassles were more active across gestation. Fetuses of women…

Sex differences in play are apparent in a number of mammalian species, including humans. Prenatal testosterone may contribute to these differences. The authors report the first attempt to correlate gender-typed play in a normative sample of humans with measurements of amniotic testosterone (aT). Testosterone was measured in the amniotic fluid of…