Scholars@Duke
Elisabeth D Conradt

Elisabeth D Conradt

Associate Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Psychiatry, Child & Family Mental Health & Community Psychiatry
liz.conradt@duke.edu
Department of Psychiatry and B, 2400 Pratt St. 7th Floor Room, Durham, NC 27705

Selected Publications

A bioecological longitudinal study of depressive symptoms from pregnancy to 36 months postpartum.

Journal Article J Affect Disord · November 15, 2024 PURPOSE: Depressive symptoms during the perinatal period have broad and enduring health implications for birthing parents and their offspring. Rising prevalence rates of perinatal depression highlight the need for research examining factors influencing dep ... Full text Link to item Cite

Childhood Maltreatment and Electrodermal Reactivity to Stress Among Pregnant Women.

Journal Article Dev Psychobiol · November 2024 There are competing theoretical hypotheses regarding the consequences of early adversity, such as childhood maltreatment, for individuals' autonomic nervous system activity. Research examining potential implications of child maltreatment for sympathetic ne ... Full text Link to item Cite

From prenatal maternal anxiety and respiratory sinus arrhythmia to toddler internalizing problems: The role of infant negative affectivity.

Journal Article Dev Psychopathol · September 20, 2024 Prenatal maternal anxiety is considered a risk factor for the development of child internalizing problems. However, little is known about potential mechanisms that account for these associations. The current study examined whether prenatal maternal anxiety ... Full text Link to item Cite

Association of maternal fish consumption and ω-3 supplement use during pregnancy with child autism-related outcomes: results from a cohort consortium analysis.

Journal Article Am J Clin Nutr · September 2024 BACKGROUND: Prenatal fish intake is a key source of omega-3 (ω-3) polyunsaturated fatty acids needed for brain development, yet intake is generally low, and studies addressing associations with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and related traits are lacking. ... Full text Link to item Cite

Prenatal influences across the life course: Biobehavioral mechanisms of development.

Journal Article Dev Psychol · September 2024 Despite the well-established importance of prenatal experiences for offspring health throughout the lifespan, our understanding of prenatal influences on psychological outcomes faces challenges due to a wide-ranging and somewhat fragmented literature. Here ... Full text Link to item Cite

Maternal psychophysiology profiles: associations with prenatal opioid use, maternal emotion dysregulation, and newborn neurobehavior.

Journal Article Pediatr Res · August 3, 2024 BACKGROUND: Opioid use among pregnant women has more than quadrupled over the past 20 years; however, comorbid risk factors such as emotion dysregulation confound the developmental consequences of prenatal opioid use. Maternal respiratory sinus arrhythmia ... Full text Link to item Cite

Examining the implications of contextual stress and maternal sensitivity for infants' cortisol responses to the still face paradigm.

Journal Article Psychoneuroendocrinology · August 2024 Infants' hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis responses to acute stressors are theorized to be shaped by parents' sensitive responsiveness to infants' cues. The strength and direction of the association between maternal sensitivity and infants' ... Full text Link to item Cite

The Combined Contributions of Newborn Stress and Parenting Stress on Toddler Language Development.

Journal Article J Pediatr · July 2024 OBJECTIVE: To examine the longitudinal associations between newborn neurobehavioral stress signs, maternal parenting stress, and several indices of toddler language development. STUDY DESIGN: Participants include 202 mother-infant dyads (104 girls). We mea ... Full text Link to item Cite

Evidence for neurobehavioral risk phenotypes at birth.

Journal Article Pediatr Res · June 21, 2024 Observations of newborn behavior provide clinicians and researchers with a first description of the neurobehavioral organization of the newborn that is largely independent of the postnatal environment. The Neonatal Network Neurobehavioral Scale (NNNS) was ... Full text Link to item Cite

A multilevel developmental psychopathology model of childbirth and the perinatal transition.

Journal Article Dev Psychopathol · May 2024 Despite recent applications of a developmental psychopathology perspective to the perinatal period, these conceptualizations have largely ignored the role that childbirth plays in the perinatal transition. Thus, we present a conceptual model of childbirth ... Full text Link to item Cite

Prenatal Substance Exposure: Associations with Neurodevelopment in Middle Childhood.

Journal Article Am J Perinatol · May 2024 OBJECTIVE: Single-substance exposure effects on neurodevelopmental outcomes, such as problem behavior and intelligence quotient (IQ), have been studied in children for decades. However, the long-term consequences of polysubstance exposure are poorly unders ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Dynamic Associations Among Sleep, Emotion Dysregulation, and Desire to Live in a Perinatal Sample.

Journal Article Psychosom Med · May 1, 2024 OBJECTIVE: The present study prospectively examined dynamic associations among sleep, emotion dysregulation, and desire to live during the perinatal transition, as it was theorized that these factors may contribute to the emergence of postpartum suicide ri ... Full text Link to item Cite

Understanding emotion dysregulation from infancy to toddlerhood with a multilevel perspective: The buffering effect of maternal sensitivity.

Journal Article Dev Psychopathol · April 29, 2024 Challenges with childhood emotion regulation may have origins in infancy and forecast later social and cognitive developmental delays, academic difficulties, and psychopathology. This study tested whether markers of emotion dysregulation in infancy predict ... Full text Link to item Cite

What's next for the field of multigenerational mental health? The need for deep behavioral phenotyping via a prenatal mental health registry.

Journal Article Dev Psychopathol · February 13, 2024 From its inception, development and psychopathology theorists have sought to uncover the earliest forms of risk for mental health challenges in children, to prevent the development of more severe, intractable manifestations of psychopathology. Large famili ... Full text Link to item Cite

A protocol for enhancing the diagnostic accuracy and predictive validity of neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome: The utility of non-invasive clinical markers.

Journal Article PLoS One · 2024 Every 15 minutes in the US, an infant exposed to opioids is born. Approximately 50% of these newborns will develop Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal Syndrome (NOWS) within 5 days of birth. It is not known which infants will develop NOWS, therefore, the current ho ... Full text Link to item Cite

Maternal sensitivity as a predictor of change in respiratory sinus arrhythmia activity from infancy to toddlerhood

Journal Article Infant and Child Development · January 1, 2024 This study examined whether parental sensitivity during distressing and non-distressing mother–infant interactions predicts changes in young children's respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) activity. Baseline RSA levels were collected from 83 children (49% fe ... Full text Cite

Newborn Neurobehavior and the Development of Infant Mental Health

Chapter · January 1, 2024 Newborn neurobehavior enables us to identify individual differences and temperament, differential susceptibility and to identify at-risk-infants. Neurobehavioral and biological (e.g., epigenetic) pathways set the stage for the “goodness-of-fit” between inf ... Full text Cite

Pregnant women's autonomic responses to an infant cry predict young infants' behavioral avoidance during the still-face paradigm.

Journal Article Dev Psychol · December 2023 Research suggests that women's autonomic nervous system responses to infant cries capture processes that affect their parenting behaviors. The aim of this study was to build on prior work by testing whether pregnant women's autonomic responses to an unfami ... Full text Link to item Cite

Development and psychometric validation of the Pandemic-Related Traumatic Stress Scale for children and adults.

Journal Article Psychol Assess · November 2023 To assess the public health impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health, investigators from the National Institutes of Health Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) research program developed the Pandemic-Related Traumatic Stress Sca ... Full text Link to item Cite

Latent Class Analysis of Prenatal Substance Exposure and Child Behavioral Outcomes.

Journal Article J Pediatr · September 2023 OBJECTIVES: To predict behavioral disruptions in middle childhood, we identified latent classes of prenatal substance use. STUDY DESIGN: As part of the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes Program, we harmonized prenatal substance use data and ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Applying Research Domain Criteria to the study of emotion dysregulation in infancy and early childhood

Journal Article Infant and Child Development · September 1, 2023 Emotion regulation is a principal task of early development. The failure to develop effective emotion regulation skills is associated with behavioural, academic, psychological and socioemotional difficulties. Although researchers have studied emotion regul ... Full text Cite

Prenatal and perinatal factors associated with neonatal neurobehavioral profiles in the ECHO Program.

Journal Article Pediatr Res · August 2023 BACKGROUND: Single-cohort studies have identified distinct neurobehavioral profiles that are associated with prenatal and neonatal factors based on the NICU Network Neurobehavioral Scale (NNNS). We examined socioeconomic, medical, and substance use variabl ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Examining implications of the developmental timing of maternal trauma for prenatal and newborn outcomes.

Journal Article Infant Behav Dev · August 2023 Separate literatures have demonstrated that mothers' experiences with trauma during childhood or pregnancy are associated with maternal prenatal health risks, adverse childbirth outcomes, and offspring internalizing and externalizing disorders. These liter ... Full text Link to item Cite

Dynamics of mother-infant parasympathetic regulation during face-to-face interaction: The role of maternal emotion dysregulation.

Journal Article Psychophysiology · June 2023 The dynamics of parent-infant physiology are essential for understanding how biological substrates of emotion regulation are organized during infancy. Although parent-infant physiological processes are dyadic in nature, research is limited in understanding ... Full text Link to item Cite

Assessment of Psychosocial and Neonatal Risk Factors for Trajectories of Behavioral Dysregulation Among Young Children From 18 to 72 Months of Age.

Journal Article JAMA Netw Open · April 3, 2023 IMPORTANCE: Emotional and behavioral dysregulation during early childhood are associated with severe psychiatric, behavioral, and cognitive disorders through adulthood. Identifying the earliest antecedents of persisting emotional and behavioral dysregulati ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Annual Research Review: Prenatal opioid exposure - a two-generation approach to conceptualizing neurodevelopmental outcomes.

Journal Article J Child Psychol Psychiatry · April 2023 Opioid use during pregnancy impacts the health and well-being of two generations: the pregnant person and the child. The factors that increase risk for opioid use in the adult, as well as those that perpetuate risk for the caregiver and child, oftentimes r ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Characteristics of Individuals in the United States Who Used Opioids During Pregnancy.

Journal Article Journal of women's health (2002) · February 2023 Background: Opioid use has disproportionally impacted pregnant people and their fetuses. Previous studies describing opioid use among pregnant people are limited by geographic location, type of medical coverage, and small sample size. We desc ... Full text Cite

Mental health symptom changes in pregnant individuals across the COVID-19 pandemic: a prospective longitudinal study.

Journal Article BMC Pregnancy Childbirth · December 3, 2022 BACKGROUND: Initial studies found that mental health symptoms increased in pregnant and postpartum individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Less research has focused on if these putative increases persist over time and what factors influence these changes ... Full text Link to item Cite

Prenatal paternal stress predicts infant parasympathetic functioning above and beyond maternal prenatal stress.

Journal Article J Reprod Infant Psychol · December 2022 BACKGROUND: Paternal stress is often assessed by maternal report and is posited to influence infant development indirectly by contributing to a mother's stress and experiences during pregnancy. Far less is known about how direct effects of prenatal paterna ... Full text Link to item Cite

Geotemporal analysis of perinatal care changes and maternal mental health: an example from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Journal Article Arch Womens Ment Health · October 2022 Our primary objective was to document COVID-19 induced changes to perinatal care across the USA and examine the implication of these changes for maternal mental health. We performed an observational cross-sectional study with convenience sampling using dir ... Full text Link to item Cite

Unique Contributions of Maternal Prenatal and Postnatal Emotion Dysregulation on Infant Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia.

Journal Article Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol · September 2022 Prenatal intrauterine exposures and postnatal caregiving environments may both shape the development of infant parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) activity. However, the relative contributions of prenatal and postnatal influences on infant respiratory sin ... Full text Link to item Cite

Bringing the laboratory into the home: A protocol for remote biobehavioral data collection in pregnant women with emotion dysregulation and their infants.

Journal Article J Health Psychol · September 2022 Pregnant women struggling with emotion dysregulation may be more likely to engage in a wide range of health risk behaviors. This protocol describes a study on intergenerational transmission of emotion dysregulation from the third trimester of pregnancy to ... Full text Link to item Cite

Trajectories of depressive symptoms among mothers of preterm and full-term infants in a national sample.

Journal Article Arch Womens Ment Health · August 2022 To examine postpartum depressive symptom trajectories from birth to age 5 and their risk factors in a national sample of mothers of preterm and full-term infants. The racially and ethnically diverse sample comprised 11,320 maternal participants (Mage = 29; ... Full text Link to item Cite

Developmental foundations of physiological dynamics among mother-infant dyads: The role of newborn neurobehavior.

Journal Article Child Dev · July 2022 This study tested whether newborn attention and arousal provide a foundation for the dynamics of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) in mother-infant dyads. Participants were 106 mothers (Mage  = 29.54) and their 7-month-old infants (55 males and 58 White a ... Full text Link to item Cite

The prism of reactivity: Concordance between biobehavioral domains of infant stress reactivity.

Journal Article Infant Behav Dev · May 2022 Across a range of challenging contexts, a complex system of stress responses within multiple domains (e.g., behavior, physiology) support, or thwart, an infant's capacity to navigate an ever-changing world. As understanding of these individual stress respo ... Full text Link to item Cite

Behavioral coping phenotypes and associated psychosocial outcomes of pregnant and postpartum women during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Journal Article Sci Rep · January 24, 2022 The impact of COVID-19-related stress on perinatal women is of heightened public health concern given the established intergenerational impact of maternal stress-exposure on infants and fetuses. There is urgent need to characterize the coping styles associ ... Full text Link to item Cite

Parent-child relationship quality and adolescent health: Testing the differential susceptibility and diathesis-stress hypotheses in African American youths.

Journal Article Child Dev · January 2022 This study tested two competing models of differential susceptibility and diathesis-stress in a prospective longitudinal study of African American youths (N = 935). It examined whether individual variations in the functioning of the hypothalamic-pituitary- ... Full text Link to item Cite

Adapting psychophysiological data collection for COVID-19: The "Virtual Assessment" model.

Journal Article Infant Ment Health J · January 2022 The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted research activities globally. Researchers need safe and creative procedures to resume data collection, particularly for projects evaluating infant mental health interventions. Remote research is uniquely ch ... Full text Link to item Cite

Prenatal maternal transdiagnostic, RDoC-informed predictors of newborn neurobehavior: Differences by sex.

Journal Article Dev Psychopathol · December 2021 We examined whether Research Domain Criteria (RDoC)-informed measures of prenatal stress predicted newborn neurobehavior and whether these effects differed by newborn sex. Multilevel, prenatal markers of prenatal stress were obtained from 162 pregnant wome ... Full text Link to item Cite

An Integrated Mechanistic Model of Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement for Opioid-Exposed Mother–Infant Dyads

Journal Article Frontiers in Psychology · October 28, 2021 A growing body of neurobiological and psychological research sheds light on the mechanisms underlying the development and maintenance of opioid use disorder and its relation to parenting behavior. Perinatal opioid use is associated with risks for women and ... Full text Cite

Influences of adversity across the lifespan on respiratory sinus arrhythmia during pregnancy.

Journal Article Dev Psychobiol · September 2021 There is limited understanding of factors across the lifespan that influence pregnant women's respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), which could have implications for their health and offspring development. We examined associations among 162 English- and Span ... Full text Link to item Cite

Maternal mindfulness during pregnancy predicts newborn neurobehavior.

Journal Article Dev Psychobiol · September 2021 Newborn neurobehavioral competencies portend a young child's abilities to modulate their arousal and attention in response to dynamic environmental cues. Although evidence suggests prenatal contributions to newborn neurobehavioral differences, no study to ... Full text Link to item Cite

Digital Phenotyping of Emotion Dysregulation Across Lifespan Transitions to Better Understand Psychopathology Risk

Journal Article Frontiers in Psychiatry · May 24, 2021 Ethical and consensual digital phenotyping through smartphone activity (i. e., passive behavior monitoring) permits measurement of temporal risk trajectories unlike ever before. This data collection modality may be particularly well-suited for capturing em ... Full text Cite

Epigenetic effects of prenatal stress

Chapter · April 19, 2021 Biological embedding of prenatal stress can increase the risk for maladaptive child neurodevelopmental outcomes. The search is on for more precise mechanisms implicated in this biological embedding. In recent years, researchers have focused on how epigenet ... Full text Cite

Behavioral and physiological stress responses: Within-person concordance during pregnancy.

Journal Article Biol Psychol · February 2021 During pregnancy, a woman's emotions can have longstanding implications for both her own and her child's health. Within-person emotional concordance refers to the simultaneous measurement of emotional responses across multiple levels of analysis. This meth ... Full text Link to item Cite

Perinatal foundations of personality pathology from a dynamical systems perspective.

Journal Article Curr Opin Psychol · February 2021 The development of personality pathology is an interactive process between biologically based susceptibilities, interpersonal patterns, and contextual factors across the lifespan. In this paper, we argue that these interactions begin before birth. We descr ... Full text Link to item Cite

Biological Embedding of Chronic Stress Across Two Generations Within Marginalized Communities

Journal Article Child Development Perspectives · December 1, 2020 Significant racial health disparities in infant mortality, preterm birth, and infant neurodevelopment exist in the United States. These disparities highlight a critical public health problem: Children of color are at a developmental disadvantage before bir ... Full text Cite

Prenatal maternal hair cortisol concentrations are related to maternal prenatal emotion dysregulation but not neurodevelopmental or birth outcomes.

Journal Article Dev Psychobiol · September 2020 Hair cortisol concentrations measured during pregnancy have emerged as a novel biomarker for prenatal stress exposure. However, associations between prenatal stress and distress, broadly defined, and hair cortisol concentrations during pregnancy are incons ... Full text Link to item Cite

Social Stress-Related Epigenetic Changes Associated With Increased Heart Rate Variability in Infants

Journal Article Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience · January 15, 2020 Early life stress can result in persistent alterations of an individual’s stress regulation through epigenetic modifications. Epigenetic alteration of the NR3C1 gene is associated with changes in the stress response system during infancy as measured by cor ... Full text Cite

Prenatal Opioid Exposure: Neurodevelopmental Consequences and Future Research Priorities.

Journal Article Pediatrics · September 2019 Neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome (NOWS) has risen in prevalence from 1.2 per 1000 births in 2000 to 5.8 per 1000 births in 2012. Symptoms in neonates may include high-pitched cry, tremors, feeding difficulty, hypertonia, watery stools, and breathing pro ... Full text Link to item Cite

Intergenerational transmission of emotion dysregulation: Part I. Psychopathology, self-injury, and parasympathetic responsivity among pregnant women.

Journal Article Dev Psychopathol · August 2019 The World Health Organization recently reported that maternal mental health is a major public health concern. As many as one in four women suffer from psychiatric disorders at some point during pregnancy or the first postpartum year. Furthermore, self-inju ... Full text Link to item Cite

Intergenerational transmission of emotion dysregulation: Part II. Developmental origins of newborn neurobehavior.

Journal Article Dev Psychopathol · August 2019 We investigated whether neurobehavioral markers of risk for emotion dysregulation were evident among newborns, as well as whether the identified markers were associated with prenatal exposure to maternal emotion dysregulation. Pregnant women (N = 162) repo ... Full text Link to item Cite

DNA methylation of NR3c1 in infancy: Associations between maternal caregiving and infant sex.

Journal Article Infant Ment Health J · July 2019 Caregivers play a critical role in scaffolding infant stress reactivity and regulation, but the mechanisms by which this scaffolding occurs is unclear. Animal models strongly suggest that epigenetic processes, such as DNA methylation, are sensitive to care ... Full text Link to item Cite

Developmental trajectories of autonomic functioning in autism from birth to early childhood.

Journal Article Biol Psychol · March 2019 Deficits in social engagement emerge in autism during the infant and toddler period and may be related to emotion regulation and stress response systems. This study examined patterns of growth in autonomic functioning related to autism diagnosis and addres ... Full text Link to item Cite

A developmental origins perspective on the emergence of violent behavior in males with prenatal substance exposure.

Journal Article Infant Ment Health J · January 2019 Children with prenatal substance exposure are at increased risk for externalizing behavior problems and violence. However, the contribution of early life experiences for placing these individuals at risk is not well understood. Utilizing a sample of 1,388 ... Full text Link to item Cite

Neurobehavioral evaluation of neonates with congenital heart disease: a cohort study.

Journal Article Dev Med Child Neurol · December 2018 AIM: To describe neurobehavioral patterns in neonates with congenital heart disease (CHD). METHOD: A cohort study describing neurobehavioral performance of neonates with CHD requiring cardiac surgery. The neonates were evaluated preoperatively and postoper ... Full text Link to item Cite

Early life stress and environmental influences on the neurodevelopment of children with prenatal opioid exposure

Journal Article Neurobiology of Stress · November 1, 2018 Prenatal opioid exposure has reached epidemic proportions. In the last 10 years, there has been a 242% increase in the number of babies born with the drug withdrawal syndrome known as Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal Syndrome (NOWS). Developmental outcome studie ... Full text Cite

Epigenetic Programming by Maternal Behavior in the Human Infant.

Journal Article Pediatrics · October 2018 UNLABELLED: : media-1vid110.1542/5804912859001PEDS-VA_2017-1890Video Abstract OBJECTIVES: We sought to determine if variations in maternal care alter DNA methylation in term, healthy, 5-month-old infants. This work was based on landmark studies in animal m ... Full text Link to item Cite

Incorporating epigenetic mechanisms to advance fetal programming theories.

Journal Article Dev Psychopathol · August 2018 Decades of fetal programming research indicates that we may be able to map the origins of many physical, psychological, and medical variations and morbidities before the birth of the child. While great strides have been made in identifying associations bet ... Full text Link to item Cite

An epigenetic pathway approach to investigating associations between prenatal exposure to maternal mood disorder and newborn neurobehavior.

Journal Article Dev Psychopathol · August 2018 Following recent advances in behavioral and psychiatric epigenetics, researchers are increasingly using epigenetic methods to study prenatal exposure to maternal mood disorder and its effects on fetal and newborn neurobehavior. Despite notable progress, va ... Full text Link to item Cite

Testing the programming of temperament and psychopathology in two independent samples of children with prenatal substance exposure.

Journal Article Dev Psychopathol · August 2018 Prenatal programming models have rarely been applied to research on children with prenatal substance exposure, despite evidence suggesting that prenatal drug exposure is a form of stress that impacts neurodevelopmental outcomes and risk for psychopathology ... Full text Link to item Cite

Epigenetic foundations of emotion dysregulation

Chapter · February 5, 2018 Emotion dysregulation is a pervasive clinical problem that likely emerges from complex Gene x Environment interactions across development. Epigenetic processes provide a molecular basis by which genotype interacts with the environment across the lifespan t ... Cite

Using Principles of Behavioral Epigenetics to Advance Research on Early-Life Stress

Journal Article Child Development Perspectives · June 1, 2017 While the negative effects of early-life stress on children's developmental outcomes are well documented, we know little about how these processes unfold and which children are more susceptible to these exposures. In this article, I outline how studying th ... Full text Cite

Links between early baseline cortisol, attachment classification, and problem behaviors: A test of differential susceptibility versus diathesis-stress.

Journal Article Infant Behav Dev · February 2017 The purpose of the current study was to predict concurrent levels of problem behaviors from young children's baseline cortisol and attachment classification, a proxy for the quality of caregiving experienced. In a sample of 58 children living at or below t ... Full text Link to item Cite

Shaping emotion regulation: attunement, symptomatology, and stress recovery within mother-infant dyads.

Journal Article Dev Psychobiol · January 2017 The foundations of emotion regulation are organized, in part, through repeated interactions with one's caregiver in infancy. Less is known about how stress physiology covaries between a mother and her infant within these interactions, leaving a gap in our ... Full text Link to item Cite

Transactional relations between caregiving stress, executive functioning, and problem behavior from early childhood to early adolescence.

Journal Article Dev Psychopathol · August 2016 Developmental psychopathologists face the difficult task of identifying the environmental conditions that may contribute to early childhood behavior problems. Highly stressed caregivers can exacerbate behavior problems, while children with behavior problem ... Full text Link to item Cite

Prenatal stress, fearfulness, and the epigenome: Exploratory analysis of sex differences in DNA methylation of the glucocorticoid receptor gene

Journal Article Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience · July 12, 2016 Exposure to stress in utero is a risk factor for the development of problem behavior in the offspring, though precise pathways are unknown. We examined whether DNA methylation of the glucocorticoid receptor gene, NR3C1, was associated with experiences of s ... Full text Cite

The Contributions of Maternal Sensitivity and Maternal Depressive Symptoms to Epigenetic Processes and Neuroendocrine Functioning.

Journal Article Child Dev · 2016 This study tested whether maternal responsiveness may buffer the child to the effects of maternal depressive symptoms on DNA methylation of NR3C1, 11β-HSD2, and neuroendocrine functioning. DNA was derived from buccal epithelial cells and prestress cortisol ... Full text Link to item Cite

Introduction to the Special Section on Epigenetics.

Journal Article Child Dev · 2016 Epigenetics provides the opportunity to revolutionize our understanding of the role of genetics and the environment in explaining human behavior, although the use of epigenetics to study human behavior is just beginning. In this introduction, the authors p ... Full text Link to item Cite

Early caregiving stress exposure moderates the relation between respiratory sinus arrhythmia reactivity at 1 month and biobehavioral outcomes at age 3.

Journal Article Psychophysiology · January 2016 There is a growing scientific interest in the psychophysiological functioning of children living in low-socioeconomic status (SES) contexts, though this research is complicated by knowledge that physiology-behavior relations often operate differently in th ... Full text Link to item Cite

Prenatal predictors of infant self-regulation: The contributions of placental DNA methylation of NR3C1 and neuroendocrine activity

Journal Article Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience · May 29, 2015 We examined whether placental DNA methylation of the glucocorticoid receptor gene, NR3C1 was associated with self-regulation and neuroendocrine responses to a social stressor in infancy. Placenta samples were obtained at birth and mothers and their infants ... Full text Cite

The contributions of early adverse experiences and trajectories of respiratory sinus arrhythmia on the development of neurobehavioral disinhibition among children with prenatal substance exposure.

Journal Article Dev Psychopathol · November 2014 Neurobehavioral disinhibition (ND) is a complex condition reflecting a wide range of problems involving difficulties with emotion regulation and behavior control. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) is a physiological correlate of emotion regulation that ha ... Full text Link to item Cite

The role of prenatal substance exposure and early adversity on parasympathetic functioning from 3 to 6 years of age.

Journal Article Dev Psychobiol · May 2014 We employed latent growth curve analysis to examine trajectories of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) from 3 to 6 years among children with varying levels of prenatal substance exposure and early adversity. Data were drawn from a prospective longitudinal ... Full text Link to item Cite

Global and gene-specific DNA methylation across multiple tissues in early infancy: implications for children's health research.

Journal Article FASEB J · May 2014 An increasing number of population studies are assessing epigenetic variation in relation to early-life outcomes in tissues accessible to epidemiologic researchers. Epigenetic mechanisms are highly tissue specific, however, and it is unclear whether the va ... Full text Link to item Cite

Cortisol reactivity to social stress as a mediator of early adversity on risk and adaptive outcomes.

Journal Article Child Dev · 2014 Children chronically exposed to stress early in life are at increased risk for maladaptive outcomes, though the physiological mechanisms driving these effects are unknown. Cortisol reactivity was tested as a mediator of the relation between prenatal substa ... Full text Link to item Cite

Physiological correlates of neurobehavioral disinhibition that relate to drug use and risky sexual behavior in adolescents with prenatal substance exposure.

Journal Article Dev Neurosci · 2014 Physiological correlates of behavioral and emotional problems, substance use onset and initiation of risky sexual behavior have not been studied in adolescents with prenatal drug exposure. We studied the concordance between baseline respiratory sinus arrhy ... Full text Link to item Cite

The roles of DNA methylation of NR3C1 and 11β-HSD2 and exposure to maternal mood disorder in utero on newborn neurobehavior.

Journal Article Epigenetics · December 2013 Exposure to maternal mood disorder in utero may program infant neurobehavior via DNA methylation of the glucocorticoid receptor (NR3C1) and 11β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 2 ( 11β-HSD-2), two placental genes that have been implicated in perturbations ... Full text Link to item Cite

Epigenetic basis for the development of depression in children.

Journal Article Clin Obstet Gynecol · September 2013 The growing field of epigenetics and human behavior affords an unprecedented opportunity to discover molecular underpinnings of mental health disorders and pave the way for the development of preventive intervention programs. Maternal depression during pre ... Full text Link to item Cite

Poverty, Problem Behavior, and Promise: Differential Susceptibility Among Infants Reared in Poverty

Journal Article Psychological Science · March 1, 2013 Do infants reared in poverty exhibit certain physiological traits that make them susceptible to the positive and negative features of their caregiving environment? Guided by theories of differential susceptibility and biological sensitivity to context, we ... Full text Cite

Prenatal substance exposure: Neurobiologic organization at 1 month

Journal Article Journal of Pediatrics · January 1, 2013 Objective: To examine the autonomic nervous system and neurobehavioral response to a sustained visual attention challenge in 1-month-old infants with prenatal substance exposure. Study design: We measured heart rate, respiratory sinus arrhythmia, and neuro ... Full text Cite

Behavioral epigenetics and the developmental origins of child mental health disorders.

Journal Article J Dev Orig Health Dis · December 2012 Advances in understanding the molecular basis of behavior through epigenetic mechanisms could help explain the developmental origins of child mental health disorders. However, the application of epigenetic principles to the study of human behavior is a rel ... Full text Link to item Cite

Screening for depression in the postpartum using the Beck Depression Inventory II: What logistic regression reveals

Journal Article Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology · November 1, 2012 Objective: To identify items on the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II) that best discriminate between clinically depressed and nondepressed postpartum women. Background: Postpartum depression is a serious and widespread health burden, and the BDI-II is ... Full text Cite

Infant physiological response to the still-face paradigm: contributions of maternal sensitivity and infants' early regulatory behavior.

Journal Article Infant Behav Dev · June 2010 The current study examined the independent and additive contributions of maternal sensitivity measured prior to and following a social stressor, and infant behaviors to infants' physiological response to the still-face paradigm (SFP) in a sample characteri ... Full text Link to item Cite