ArticleDemography2018
Prenatal Exposure to an Acute Stressor and Children's Cognitive Outcomes.
Article in Demography, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 57 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children and Birth Outcomes Among Hispanic Mothers in California: A Sibling Control Design.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2025Article
- Parental responses to children's early health disadvantages: evidence from a British twin study.European sociological review · 2025Article
- Maternal stress during pregnancy alters circulating small extracellular vesicles and enhances their targeting to the placenta and fetus.Biological research · 2024Article
- The Effects of the Flint water crisis on the educational outcomes of school-age children.Science advances · 2024Article
- Disparate Effects of Disruptive Events on Children.The Russell Sage Foundation journal of the social sciences : RSF · 2024Article
- Unequal Effects of Wildfire Exposure on Infant Health by Maternal Education, 1995-2020.The Russell Sage Foundation journal of the social sciences : RSF · 2024Article
- A Time of Healing: Can Social Engagement After Bereavement Reduce Trajectories of Depression After the Death of a Child?The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2023Article
- Opportunities and challenges in using instrumental variables to study causal effects in nonrandomized stress and trauma research.Psychological trauma : theory, research, practice and policy · 2023Review
- How Maternal Trauma Exposure Contributed to Children's Depressive Symptoms following the Wenchuan Earthquake: A Multiple Mediation Model Study.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- The Unequal Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Infant Health.Demography · 2022Article
- Unequal effects of disruptive events.Sociology compass · 2022Article
- The impact of unemployment benefits on birth outcomes: Quasi-experimental evidence from European linked register data.PloS one · 2022Article
- The cognitive development from childhood to adolescence of low birthweight children born after medically assisted reproduction-a UK longitudinal cohort study.International journal of epidemiology · 2021Article
- Does postponing retirement affect cognitive function? A counterfactual experiment to disentangle life course risk factors.SSM - population health · 2021Article
- Maternal exposure to a high-magnitude earthquake during pregnancy influences pre-reading skills in early childhood.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- What is the causal effect of income gains on youth obesity? Leveraging the economic boom created by the Marcellus Shale development.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2021Article
- RETRACTED: Police violence and the health of black infants.Science advances · 2019Article
- Climate change and educational attainment in the global tropics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- What is prenatal stress? A scoping review of how prenatal stress is defined and measured within the context of food insecurity, housing instability, and immigration in the United States.Women's health (London, England)Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Exposure to environmental stressors is highly prevalent and unequally distributed along socioeconomic lines and may have enduring negative consequences, even when experienced before birth. Yet, estimating the consequences of prenatal stress on children's outcomes is complicated by the issue of confounding (i.e., unobserved factors correlated with stress exposure and with children's outcomes). I combine a natural experiment-a strong earthquake in Chile-with a panel survey to capture the effect of prenatal exposure on acute stress and children's cognitive ability. I find that stress exposure in early pregnancy has no effect on children's cognition among middle-class families, but it has a strong negative influence among disadvantaged families. I then examine possible pathways accounting for the socioeconomic stratification in the effect of stress, including differential exposure across socioeconomic status, differential sensitivity, and parental responses. Findings suggest that the interaction between prenatal exposures and socioeconomic advantage provides a powerful mechanism for the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.