Szekely and Wazana - Prenatal Stress Flashcards
When does stress occur?
When one perceives that environmental demands exceed their capacity of adaptation.
What are some of the forms of prenatal stress?
When the following arise during pregnancy:
-Daily hassles
-Existential hardship
-Conflicts
-Mental health problems
What are the categories of prenatal stress differentiated to make its assessment?
Stressful life events
Contextual risks
Risks from parental characteristics
Interpersonal risks
What can be done to yield a more objective measure of prenatal stress that takes into account the causal relationships between different measures?
Modeling co-variance between categories -> cumulative prenatal environmental adversity index (A-factor)
What is the difference between objective and subjective prenatal stress?
Objective = amount of hardship (intensity and freq.)
Subjective = response to hardship
How can maternal stress affect the fetus?
Stress hormones (e.g., cortisol) pass from the mother to the fetus via the placenta
Why type of anxiety is strongly associated with infant cognitive and temperamental problems?
Pregnant-specific anxiety
What are two common prenatal stress disorders?
Depression and anxiety
What is an important risk factor component to anxiety or depression during pregnancy?
History (of depression, of abuse, …)
What are the latent dimensions of prenatal maternal affective symptoms as found by confirmatory factor analyses?
General psychopathology, specific internalizing, specific externalizing
What is the concept of prenatal programming?
Prenatal stress could alter the development of critical biological systems, conferring laster susceptibility (potentially through epigenetic modifications)
True or false: there are sex-dimorphic effects of prenatal stress.
True: females adapt better to intrauterine stressors than males, risking less severe complications (mortality or pervasive mortality), but are more prone to other long laster health complications (anxiety and depression)
What is one mechanism by which placental functions relate to disruptions in the sexually dimorphic brain?
Steroid hormone production during key periods of brain development (autism = hypermasculinized brain, schizophrenia = hypomasculinized brain)
True or false: sex-specific environmental effects are present already before birth
True
What is the evidence so far for sex-dependent programming effects?
Offspring neural development and temperament
What are offspring nervous system development sex differences?
Females more vulnerable to prenatal stress, but risks less severe (psychopathology) consequences than males
What are offspring temperament sex differences?
Prenatal stress usually conduct to negative emotionality and reactivity in females, but decreased emotionality and reactivity in boys instead.
What could explain the differential responses to prenatal environmental conditions?
Heritable genetic polymorphism
What does the diathesis-stress model posit?
Mental disorder develops from combination of vulnerability + exposure to stressful events
What does the vantage sensitivty model posit?
People develop different levels of functioning in function of exposure to positive experiences
What is the differential susceptibility model?
Whether an individual does remarkably good or bad relates in both instances to his plasticity/melleable character = plasticity for better or for worse
Individuals with low plasticity = “fixed” individuals ->context has less impact on their functioning
Which factor has a robust potential to modify the impact of prenatal adversity in genetically susceptible children?
Parenting
What is one kind of parenting that has show very efficient in buffering negative effects of prenatal adversity?
Sensitive parenting
What are three dimensions know to influence toddler attention development?
Prenatal adversity
Genetic (dopamine)
Early parenting
