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. 2023 Oct:183:108673.
doi: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2023.108673. Epub 2023 Sep 9.

Neural reactivity to infant emotion cues during pregnancy: Associations with peripartum anxiety and depressive symptoms

Emilia F Cárdenas  1 , Kaylin E Hill  2 , Elizabeth Estes  3 , Maya Jackson  2 , Lisa Venanzi  2 , Kathryn L Humphreys  2 , Autumn Kujawa  2
Affiliations

Neural reactivity to infant emotion cues during pregnancy: Associations with peripartum anxiety and depressive symptoms

Emilia F Cárdenas et al. Biol Psychol. 2023 Oct.

Abstract

Background: Pregnancy is marked by physiological and psychosocial changes for women, and event-related potentials (ERP) are comfortable and safe for examining brain function across pregnancy. The late positive potential (LPP) ERP, a measure of allocated attention to emotional stimuli, may provide insight into associations between internalizing symptoms and neural processing of infant emotion cues, which may be particularly salient in this life stage.

Methods: We developed a task to examine neural and behavioral responses to infant faces in pregnant women (N = 120, Mage=31.09, SD=4.81), the impact of auditory infant cries on the LPP to faces, and associations between the LPP and anxiety and depressive symptoms. Participants matched distressed, happy, and neutral infant faces and shapes as a comparison condition with interspersed auditory conditions (infant cry sounds vs. white noise) while electroencephalogram data were collected. Participants also completed self-report measures of anxiety and depressive symptoms.

Results: Reaction time (RT) was faster for the infant cry vs. white noise condition and when matching shapes vs. infant faces. Depressive symptoms were associated with slower RTs to neutral infant faces. The LPP was enhanced overall to faces vs. shapes, but there was no main effect of auditory condition. Anxiety symptoms were associated with an enhanced LPP to infant distressed faces in the infant cry condition.

Conclusions: Results support these methods for measuring neural and behavioral responses to infant emotional cues in pregnancy and provide evidence that combinations of auditory and visual stimuli may be particularly useful for capturing emotional processes relevant to anxiety.

Keywords: Anxiety; Depression; Emotion; Event-related potentials; Late positive potential; Peripartum; Pregnancy.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Competing Interest The authors have no conflict of interest to disclose about the submitted findings. All authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1:
Figure 1:
Overview of the EEG infant face matching task. Participants were shown three faces or shapes in a triangular formation and asked to click the left or right mouse to indicate which of the two bottom images matched the image at the top of the screen. Between trials, participants were shown a fixation cross accompanied with auditory stimuli specific to the auditory condition (i.e., white noise or infant cry). Reaction time between stimulus presentation and participant response was recorded. The LPP was time-locked to stimulus presentation.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
RT means (and standard errors) across task conditions and stimuli. Note. *Difference was significant at the .05 level (2-tailed). **Difference was significant at the .01 level (2 tailed).
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Grand-averaged LPP waveforms in the auditory white noise condition for each stimulus type and scalp topographies for the LPP to infant faces minus shapes 400 to 1000 ms after stimulus onset. Note. The LPP was calculated as a pooling across electrode sites CP1, CP2, Pz, Oz, O1, O2.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Grand-averaged LPP waveforms in the auditory infant cry condition for each stimulus type and scalp topographies for the LPP to infant faces minus shapes 400 to 1000 ms. Note. The LPP was calculated as a pooling across electrode sites CP1, CP2, Pz, Oz, O1, O2.
Figure 5.
Figure 5.
LPP means (and standard errors) across stimuli and task conditions. Note. **Difference was significant at the .01 level (2 tailed).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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