Depressive symptoms in early pregnancy disrupt attentional processing of infant emotion

Growing evidence suggests that perinatal depression is associated with disrupted mother-infant interactions and poor infant outcomes. Antenatal depression may play a key role in this cycle by disrupting the development of a maternal response to infant stimuli. The current study therefore investigate...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychological medicine 2010-04, Vol.40 (4), p.621-631
Main Authors: Pearson, R. M., Cooper, R. M., Penton-Voak, I. S., Lightman, S. L., Evans, J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Adult and adolescent clinical studies
Affect
Attention
Attention bias
Babies
Biological and medical sciences
Cognition & reasoning
Depression
Depressive Disorder - diagnosis
Depressive Disorder - epidemiology
Emotions
Female
Humans
Infant
infant stimuli
Infants
Information processing
Medical sciences
Mental depression
Mood disorders
Mothers
Pregnancy
Pregnancy Complications - epidemiology
Pregnancy Complications - psychology
Pregnancy Trimester, First - psychology
Pregnant women
Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
Reaction Time
Women
Young Adult
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Summary:Growing evidence suggests that perinatal depression is associated with disrupted mother-infant interactions and poor infant outcomes. Antenatal depression may play a key role in this cycle by disrupting the development of a maternal response to infant stimuli. The current study therefore investigated the impact of depressive symptoms on the basic cognitive processing of infant stimuli at the beginning of pregnancy. A total of 101 women were recruited by community midwives and tested at an average gestation of 11 weeks. An established computerized paradigm measured women's ability to disengage attention from infant and adult faces displaying negative positive and neutral emotions. Depressive symptoms were measured using a computerized interview (the Clinical Interview Schedule). The effect of infant emotion on women's ability to disengage from infant faces was found to be influenced by depressive symptoms. Non-depressed pregnant women took longer to disengage attention from distressed compared with non-distressed infant faces. This bias was not, however, seen in women experiencing depressive symptoms. There was a difference of -53 (s.d.=0.7) ms (95% confidence interval -90 to -14, p=0.007) between those with and without depressive symptoms in this measure of attentional bias towards distressed infant faces. Our results suggest that depressive symptoms are already associated with differential attentional processing of infant emotion at the very beginning of childbearing. The findings have potential implications for our understanding of the impact of depressive symptoms during pregnancy on the developing mother-infant relationship.
ISSN:0033-2917
1469-8978
DOI:10.1017/S0033291709990961