Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
Psychological Measures of Prenatal Stress as Predictors of Infant Temperament
Section snippets
Aims of the Study
The present study examined the relation of maternal prenatal stress with infant temperament reported by the mother and on objectively observed behavior in a standard novel situation. In line with the findings of animal studies, we hypothesize that prenatal stress is related to more difficult temperament of the child and to more problematic adaptation to a novel situation. Moreover, we expect prenatally stressed infants to have problems in their attention regulation in a standard novel test
Participants
Nulliparous women with a singleton pregnancy were recruited from referrals to the outpatient clinic of the Department of Obstetrics of the University Medical Centre Utrecht (UMCU). The clinic is also a first-line referral center where the majority of pregnant women seen carry a low to normal risk status and have their pregnancy supervised by midwives working at the Department of Obstetrics. The UMCU is located outside the city of Utrecht and attracts a mixed rural and urban population of
Descriptive Analyses
Means, standard deviations, and range in scores of the predictors and dependent variables are presented in Table 1. Descriptive information on the subject sample is provided in Table 2.
Stress in Early Pregnancy and Infants’ Observed Behavior
The results are summarized in Table 4. After adjusting for postnatal stress and postnatal depression of the mother, multiple regression showed a linear negative association of pregnancy anxiety in early pregnancy with attention regulation in 3-month-old babies, explaining 3.3% of the total variance (Table 4). At
DISCUSSION
This study showed that various aspects of prenatal maternal stress were associated with the temperament of infants at ages 3 and 8 months. Pregnancy anxiety was related to a decrease in attention regulation during a standard test situation at 3 months, and both pregnancy anxiety and perceived stress were related to a decrease in attention regulation at 8 months. Levels of perceived stress were associated with more problems in adaptation to a new situation, to the presence of unfamiliar persons,
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This work was financially supported by the Van der Gaag Stichting and by the Praeventiefonds (28-2685).