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

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.