Abstract
BackgroundMother-infant interaction provides important training for the infant’s ability to cope with stress and the development of resilience. Prenatal stress (PS) and its impact on the offspring’s development have long been a focus of stress research, with studies highlighting both harmful and beneficial effects. The aim of the current study was to examine the possible influence of both psychological stress and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activity during pregnancy with mother-child dyadic behavior following stress exposure.MethodsThe behavior of 164 mother-infant dyads during the still-face situation was filmed at six months postpartum and coded into three dyadic patterns: 1) both positive, 2) infant protesting-mother positive, and 3) infant protesting-mother negative. PS exposure was assessed prenatally according to psychological measures (i.e., psychopathological, perceived and psychosocial PS; n = 164) and HPA axis activity measures (maternal salivary cortisol, i.e., cortisol decline and area under the curve with respect to ground (AUCg); n = 134).ResultsMother-infant dyads in both the high- and low-stress groups showed decreasing positive and increasing negative dyadic behavior in the reunion episode, which is associated with the well-known “still-face” and “carry-over” effect. Furthermore, mother-infant dyads with higher psychosocial PS exhibited significantly more positive dyadic behavior than the low psychosocial PS group in the first play episode, but not in the reunion episode. Similarly, mother-infant dyads with high HPA axis activity (i.e. high AUCg) but steeper diurnal cortisol decline (i.e. cortisol decline) displayed significantly less negative behavior in the reunion episode than dyads with low HPA axis activity. No significant results were found for psychopathological stress and perceived stress.ConclusionsThe results suggest a beneficial effect of higher psychosocial PS and higher prenatal maternal HPA axis activity in late gestation, which is in line with “stress inoculation” theories.
Highlights
Mother-infant interaction provides important training for the infant’s ability to cope with stress and the development of resilience
Given the highly significant intercorrelations between the psychological stress variables, we decided to assess the impact of the distinct stress dimensions separately in order to examine specific effects, similar to previous findings from our group by Dukal [54] and Nieratschker [64]
HPA axis activity and psychological stress measures showed a significant negative association of cortisol decline with psychopathological stress (r = −0.203; p = .019) and psychosocial stress (r = −0.184; p = .033), whereas perceived stress was unrelated to cortisol decline (r = −0.003; p = .974)
Summary
Mother-infant interaction provides important training for the infant’s ability to cope with stress and the development of resilience. The majority of recent studies focusing on early life stress (ELS) and its role in the development of health and disease, as well as resilience [10,11,12,13], suggest that ELS, and especially prenatal stress (PS), has an important impact on epigenetic alterations in the DNA and on changes in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis [14]. Infants who are overexposed to glucocorticoids may suffer from long-term alterations, mainly referred to as epigenetic methylation of the DNA [13] The severity of these alterations is influenced by geneenvironment interactions, which depend on several factors such as the timing (i.e., sensitive time frames), duration, and quantity of stressors [22]
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