Szekely and Wazana - Prenatal Stress

Question 1

When does stress occur?

Answer 1

When one perceives that environmental demands exceed their capacity of adaptation.

Question 2

What are some of the forms of prenatal stress?

Answer 2

When the following arise during pregnancy:

-Daily hassles
-Existential hardship
-Conflicts
-Mental health problems

Question 3

What are the categories of prenatal stress differentiated to make its assessment?

Answer 3

Stressful life events
Contextual risks
Risks from parental characteristics
Interpersonal risks

Question 4

What can be done to yield a more objective measure of prenatal stress that takes into account the causal relationships between different measures?

Answer 4

Modeling co-variance between categories -> cumulative prenatal environmental adversity index (A-factor)

Question 5

What is the difference between objective and subjective prenatal stress?

Answer 5

Objective = amount of hardship (intensity and freq.)
Subjective = response to hardship

Question 6

How can maternal stress affect the fetus?

Answer 6

Stress hormones (e.g., cortisol) pass from the mother to the fetus via the placenta

Question 7

Why type of anxiety is strongly associated with infant cognitive and temperamental problems?

Answer 7

Pregnant-specific anxiety

Question 8

What are two common prenatal stress disorders?

Answer 8

Depression and anxiety

Question 9

What is an important risk factor component to anxiety or depression during pregnancy?

Answer 9

History (of depression, of abuse, …)

Question 10

What are the latent dimensions of prenatal maternal affective symptoms as found by confirmatory factor analyses?

Answer 10

General psychopathology, specific internalizing, specific externalizing

Question 11

What is the concept of prenatal programming?

Answer 11

Prenatal stress could alter the development of critical biological systems, conferring laster susceptibility (potentially through epigenetic modifications)

Question 12

True or false: there are sex-dimorphic effects of prenatal stress.

Answer 12

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)

Question 13

What is one mechanism by which placental functions relate to disruptions in the sexually dimorphic brain?

Answer 13

Steroid hormone production during key periods of brain development (autism = hypermasculinized brain, schizophrenia = hypomasculinized brain)

Question 14

True or false: sex-specific environmental effects are present already before birth

Answer 14

True

Question 15

What is the evidence so far for sex-dependent programming effects?

Answer 15

Offspring neural development and temperament

Question 16

What are offspring nervous system development sex differences?

Answer 16

Females more vulnerable to prenatal stress, but risks less severe (psychopathology) consequences than males

Question 17

What are offspring temperament sex differences?

Answer 17

Prenatal stress usually conduct to negative emotionality and reactivity in females, but decreased emotionality and reactivity in boys instead.

Question 18

What could explain the differential responses to prenatal environmental conditions?

Answer 18

Heritable genetic polymorphism

Question 19

What does the diathesis-stress model posit?

Answer 19

Mental disorder develops from combination of vulnerability + exposure to stressful events

Question 20

What does the vantage sensitivty model posit?

Answer 20

People develop different levels of functioning in function of exposure to positive experiences

Question 21

What is the differential susceptibility model?

Answer 21

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

Question 22

Which factor has a robust potential to modify the impact of prenatal adversity in genetically susceptible children?

Answer 22

Parenting

Question 23

What is one kind of parenting that has show very efficient in buffering negative effects of prenatal adversity?

Answer 23

Sensitive parenting

Question 24

What are three dimensions know to influence toddler attention development?

Answer 24

Prenatal adversity
Genetic (dopamine)
Early parenting

Question 25

Interaction between each dimensions of toddler attention development have been shown to interact?

Answer 25

Multiple dopamine-related genes affected toddler attentional competence and they did so in interaction with prenatal adversity and the early rearing environment, SEPARATELY.

Question 26

What is the main goal of DREAM BIG?

Answer 26

Harmonizing comparable prenatal cohorts to determine the role of the early environment and genetics in pathways towards childhood psychopathology.

Question 26

DREAM BIG tries to harmonize exposure at three different levels, which ones?

Answer 26

Socio-environmental adversity
Prenatal maternal affective symptoms
Genetic susceptibility

Question 27

What are the harmonized exposure factors modelled by DREAM BIG?

Answer 27

A factor: socioenvironmental adversity
M factor: prenatal maternal affective symptoms
Genetic susceptibility

Question 28

What are the harmonized outcome factors modelled by DREAM BIG?

Answer 28

General psychopathology
ADHD

Question 29

What is the P-factor?

Answer 29

Harmonized general psychopathology relying on Hierarchical Taxonomy Of Psychopathology (HiTOP), a dimensional approach that cuts through traditional DSM diagnoses

Question 30

How is the harmonized phenotype of ADHD modelled?

Answer 30

Composite score using a weighted mean of parent and teacher measures