Maternal Pre- and Postnatal Anxiety Symptoms and Infant Attention Disengagement from Emotional Faces

Around 15-30% of women report symptoms of anxiety at some stages during pregnancy or early postpartum period (Fairbrother, Janssen, Antony, Tucker,& Young, 2016; Leach, Poyser,& Fairweather-Schmidt, 2017). Maternal prenatal anxiety, often conceptualized under the umbrella term “prenatal distress” referring to an adverse situation yielding emotional and/bodily responses in a pregnant mother, is a risk factor for adverse child neurodevelopment, increasing the probability of neurocognitive, behavioral and emotional problems later in life (Doyle& Cicchetti, 2018; Glover, 2014; Huizink& De Rooij, 2018; Van den Bergh et  al., 2017; Van den Bergh, Dahnke,& Mennes, 2018).

Source: Journal of Affective Disorders - September 17, 2018 Category: Neurology Authors: Eeva-Leena Kataja, Linnea Karlsson, Christine E. Parsons, Juho Pelto, Henri Pesonen, Tuomo H äikiö, Jukka Hyönä, Saara Nolvi, Riikka Korja, Hasse Karlsson Tags: Research paper Source Type: research