Maternal symptoms of prenatal depression predict context-incongruent negative emotion in infants.

Prenatal symptoms of depression in mothers are associated with infants' emotional reactivity. Context-incongruent reactivity, comprising mismatches between the eliciting context and emotional reactions, predicts negative long-term socioemotional outcomes in children. However, the etiology of context-incongruent reactivity is largely unknown, obscuring a full understanding of its potential role as a vulnerability in models outlining the transmission of risk for emotion difficulties from mothers to offspring.

Socioeconomic status moderates neural markers of cognitive reappraisal across preschool.

Emotion regulation (ER) is critical for children's healthy socio-emotional development, in part through its modulation of negative emotions that might otherwise place children at risk for psychopathology. The cognitive ER strategy of reappraisal appears to be particularly protective against the development of symptoms of anxiety and depression during childhood. Despite widespread acceptance of the benefits of reappraisal for children's long-term affective function, little is known about the developmental mechanisms that support emerging reappraisal in young children.

Prenatal maternal depression predicts neural maturation and negative emotion in infants.

Despite widespread acceptance that prenatal symptoms of depression in mothers are detrimental to infants' long-term emotional and cognitive development, little is known about the mechanisms that may integrate outcomes across these domains. Rooted in the integrative perspective that emotional development is grounded in developing cognitive processes, we hypothesized that prenatal symptoms of depression in mothers would be associated with delays in neural maturation that support sociocognitive function in infants, leading to more problematic behaviors. We used a prospective longitudinal study of mothers (N = 92) and their infants to test whether self-reported symptoms of depression in mothers during the second and third trimesters were associated with neural development and infant outcomes at 4 months of age.

Deriving within-person estimates of delta-beta coupling: A novel measure for identifying individual differences in emotion and neural function in childhood.

Delta-beta coupling is increasingly used to understand early emotional development. However, little is known about the development of the coupling, limiting its utility for identifying normative or aberrant functioning. We used a prospective longitudinal sample (N = 122) to compare measures of within-person and between-person coupling between ages 3 and 5, track the developmental trajectory of coupling, identify individual differences in patterns of development, and explore emotion-related predictors and outcomes of discrete developmental patterns.