Examining the Relation Between Prenatal Emotion Dysregulation and Toddler Vocabulary Development: A Biobehavioral Approach.

Early language is shaped by parent-child interactions and has been examined in relation to maternal psychopathology and parenting stress. Minimal work has examined the relation between maternal emotion dysregulation and toddler vocabulary development. This longitudinal study examined associations between maternal emotion dysregulation prenatally, maternal everyday stress at 7 months postpartum, and toddler vocabulary at 18 months.

From prenatal maternal anxiety and respiratory sinus arrhythmia to toddler internalizing problems: The role of infant negative affectivity.

Prenatal maternal anxiety is considered a risk factor for the development of child internalizing problems. However, little is known about potential mechanisms that account for these associations. The current study examined whether prenatal maternal anxiety was indirectly associated with toddler internalizing problems via prenatal maternal physiology and infant negative affectivity.

A bioecological longitudinal study of depressive symptoms from pregnancy to 36 months postpartum.

Purpose: Depressive symptoms during the perinatal period have broad and enduring health implications for birthing parents and their offspring. Rising prevalence rates of perinatal depression highlight the need for research examining factors influencing depressive symptoms during pregnancy, and trajectories during the early postnatal period. Grounded in bioecological systems theory, this longitudinal multimethod study examined whether prenatal bioecological factors predict depressive symptoms from pregnancy to 36 months postpartum.

Examining the implications of contextual stress and maternal sensitivity for infants' cortisol responses to the still face paradigm.

Infants' hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis responses to acute stressors are theorized to be shaped by parents' sensitive responsiveness to infants' cues. The strength and direction of the association between maternal sensitivity and infants' HPA responses may depend on the context in which maternal sensitivity is observed and on broader environmental sources of stress and support. In this preregistered study, we used data from 105 mothers and their 7-month-old infants to examine whether two empirically identified forms of contextual stress-poor maternal psychosocial wellbeing and family socioeconomic hardship-moderate the association between maternal sensitivity and infants' cortisol responses to the Still-Face Paradigm (SFP).