ArticleJournal of affective disorders2024
Maternal anxiety during pregnancy predicts infant attention to affective faces.
Article in Journal of affective disorders, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 9 citations in OpenAlex.
- The effect of mindfulness group counseling on the anxiety of pregnant women exposed to domestic violence: a randomized clinical trial.BMC psychology · 2025Trial
- Fetal Cortisol Exposure and Offspring Socioemotional Development.Developmental psychobiology · 2026Article
- Neonatal striatal volume is associated with infant anhedonia.Journal of affective disorders · 2026Article
- Investigating the dynamic relations between maternal sleep and depression across pregnancy.Journal of mood and anxiety disorders · 2025Article
- Prenatal Maternal Mindfulness as a Predictor of Infant Emerging Effortful Control and Negative Affect.Mindfulness · 2025Article
- Prevalence and risk factors for antenatal anxiety in the first trimester among Chinese pregnant women.General psychiatry · 2025Article
- Association between prenatal maternal sleep quality, neonatal uncinate fasciculus white matter, and infant negative emotionality.EBioMedicine · 2024Article
- Higher prenatal anxiety predicts lower neonatal hair cortisol.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 5 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundPrenatal maternal anxiety is a known influence on offspring development. General anxiety and pregnancy-related anxiety (a distinct type of anxiety encompassing fears associated with pregnancy) are associated with offspring socioemotional development, with potential consequences for later emotional and behavioral problems. This study examines whether maternal pregnancy-related and general anxiety relate to infant attention to affective faces, a process which plays an integral role in early socioemotional development.
methodsParticipants included 86 mothers and their 6-month-old infants (56.3 % female). Mothers completed measures of pregnancy-related and general anxiety three times through gestation. Infants' attention to affective faces was assessed with an eye-tracking task during which a series of face pairs were presented (happy, angry, or sad face paired with a neutral face). Overall attention measures included attention-holding (total looking time) and attention-orienting (latency to faces); affect-biased attention measures included proportion of total looking time to emotional faces and latency difference score.
resultsHigher maternal pregnancy-related anxiety across gestation predicted decreased infant attention-holding to affective faces [F(1,80) = 7.232, p = .009, partial η2 = 0.083]. No differences were found in infant attention-orienting or affect-biased attention. LIMITATIONS: Reliance on a correlational study design precludes the ability to make causal inferences.
conclusionsMaternal pregnancy-related anxiety is an important predictor of child outcomes. We provide novel evidence that pregnancy-related anxiety predicts infant attention to emotional faces, behaviors which have important implications for socioemotional development. Providers may consider pregnancy-related anxiety as a target for screening and treatment that may benefit both pregnant individual and offspring.
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