A recent study led by Dr. Rebecca Brooker, a professor at Texas A&M University’s department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dr. Jennifer Kling, a former graduate student and Dr. Jung Won Choi, a postdoctoral research fellow, examined how pregnancy may be a time of ongoing changes to the brain that can influence maternal mental health, caregiving and infants’ emotional development.
The study explored how neural responses to emotional stimuli during pregnancy related to postpartum anxiety and depression symptoms in mothers. Researchers collected data from 92 pregnant women from the second trimester through four months postpartum, measuring brain activity using electroencephalography, or EEG.
The team was primarily interested in investigating how pregnancy may affect the brain over time, specifically in neural processes that may underlie maternal emotional reactivity and impact maternal and infant mental health outcomes.
Because pregnancy and the postpartum period involve significant biological and psychological changes, it was important to distinguish between trait-level neural responses, which are characteristic of an individual and stable over time, from state-level neural responses, which may undergo significant changes during pregnancy.
The team focused on the late positive potential, or LPP, a neural signal linked to emotional reactivity. They found that lower trait-level LPP was associated with greater depressive symptoms. They also found that higher state-level LPP predicted increased anxiety and depression symptoms during the perinatal period. This finding indicates that amplifications in the brain’s responses to emotions during pregnancy, beyond trait or individual characteristics, may be linked to mothers’ risk for anxiety and depression.
Brooker and other researchers in the department of Psychological and Brain Sciences have ongoing neuroimaging studies with infants, children ages 6-10, college students, midlife adults, and older adults experiencing age-related cognitive decline. Together, these projects are aimed at better understanding brain health and emotional well-being across the lifespan.
This research was funded by Montana IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research, National Institute of Mental Health and National Institute of General Medical Sciences.