Negative emotional responses to motherhood-related support receipt during pregnancy predict postpartum depressive symptoms.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Prenatal stress increases risk for postpartum depression. While social support availability may attenuate this risk, little research has examined support receipt during pregnancy, which has been linked to increased distress in other domains. This study assesses the implications of motherhood-related and motherhood-unrelated support receipt for daily distress during pregnancy and tests whether negative responsiveness to motherhood-related support predicts postpartum depression risk. DESIGN AND METHOD: Thirty-one pregnant women were recruited from the community for a 3-wave study (beginning at approximately 26 weeks gestation, 34 weeks gestation, and 4 weeks postpartum). Each wave included a survey of general characteristics (e.g. depressive symptoms) and a two-week diary period measuring mood, stress, and support. RESULTS: A multilevel model analysis suggested that motherhood-related support predicted greater increases in daily distress than motherhood-unrelated support. Follow-up regression analysis showed that those who responded more negatively to motherhood-related support reported higher postpartum depressive symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: Although preliminary due to the sample size, the results suggest that how women interpret and respond to support may contribute to postpartum depression risk. Future research should focus on how mothers can more positively construe the support they receive in addition to how to increase the support available to them.

The sweet spot of clinical intuitions: Predictors of the effects of context on impressions of conduct disorder symptoms.

How people interpret a mental disorder symptom has been shown to depend on the contextual life factors surrounding its presentation. Specifically, people are more likely to judge a symptom as clinically relevant if that symptom presents in a high-risk environment (e.g., child associates with deviant peers) relative to a low-risk environment (e.g., child associates with normative peer group). Importantly, not all symptoms are influenced by context to the same extent, and there is low agreement across people as to how this influence manifests. In this paper, we explore what factors predict the extent to which clinicians and laypeople interpret mental disorder symptoms as a function of diagnosis-congruent versus incongruent contextual information. We tested the impact of 2 statistical factors (prevalence and diagnosticity) and 2 more intuitive factors (diagnostic importance and abnormality) on the degree to which a symptom is interpreted differently in different contexts. Clinicians' impressions of the diagnosticity and importance of a symptom evidenced a curvilinear relationship with the use of context, with extremely important and unimportant as well as extremely diagnostic and nondiagnostic symptoms being less influenced by context. Laypeople showed a similar curvilinear relation between diagnosticity judgments and context effects. Additionally, clinicians showed a linear relationship between abnormality judgments and context use, with extremely abnormal symptoms being influenced less by context, whereas laypeople showed a curvilinear relationship between symptom abnormality and context use, with extremely abnormal and normal symptoms being influenced the most by context. We discuss implications of these findings for clinical diagnosis. (PsycINFO Database Record

Trajectories of BMI from early childhood through early adolescence: SES and psychosocial predictors.

OBJECTIVES: This study examined the ways in which body mass index (BMI) percentile - an identified risk factor for overweight and cardiovascular disease in adulthood - develops from birth through early adolescence. In addition, we examined whether psychosocial factors, such as parenting style and maternal depression, mediated the link between socio-economic status (SES) and BMI growth. Design. Data were obtained from phases 1-3 of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD) - a longitudinal study that followed children from 10 communities in the United States from birth to age 11. METHODS: We applied growth mixture models to identify distinct subtypes of BMI development. Within these models, we performed between- and within-class mediation analyses to examine whether SES predicted class membership or differences in development within each class via maternal depression and parenting styles. RESULTS: Results identified three prototypic trajectories of BMI percentile growth, elevated, steady increase, and stable. We found evidence for both between- and within-class mediation, suggesting multiple pathways by which SES can affect BMI development. CONCLUSIONS: These findings add to the research that suggests that being in a family with a low SES is associated with falling into patterns of development characterized by early and lasting increases in BMI relative to one's peers, and that this association is partly accounted for by maternal depression and parenting styles. STATEMENT OF CONTRIBUTION: What is already known? Past research has found evidence that patterns of childhood overweight are impacted by socioeconomic status through psychosocial factors like parenting and depression. This evidence is often limited to individual points in time where neglectful, permissive, and authoritarian parenting and higher levels of maternal depression are associated with higher levels of overweight status among children from infancy to adolescence. However, little research has linked together whether the children who receive non-authoritative parenting and are overweight in infancy are the same children who are overweight in adolescence. WHAT DOES THIS STUDY ADD?: • Evidence for 3 different prototypes of BMI percentile growth over the course of childhood approaching adolescence. • Adds complexity re the influence of parenting styles as an influence on patterns of weight gain. • Buttresses existing research as to early and lasting effects of SES on patterns of BMI.

The relationship between implicit and explicit motives, goal pursuit, and autobiographical memory content during a diary study.

This online diary study investigated how motives interact with goal pursuit to predict daily autobiographical experiences. Participants (N =141) completed measures of implicit and explicit achievement, provided daily memories and reports of their goal pursuit during a three-week diary period. A stronger implicit achievement motive at the onset of the study was associated with more agentic (and fewer communal) autobiographical content. Goal progress was linked with using more agentic words, while goal attainability was related to using more communal words. Interactions between motives and goal pursuit on autobiographical memory suggests a trade-off: Favorable goal pursuit conditions may prompt people not motivated for achievement to shift their focus from agentic to communal themes, while individuals motivated for achievement maintain their priorities.

The time course of grief reactions to spousal loss: evidence from a national probability sample.

Most studies of widowhood have focused on reactions during the first few years postloss. The authors investigated whether widowhood had more enduring effects using a nationally representative U.S. sample. Participants were 768 individuals who had lost their spouse (from a few months to 64 years) prior to data collection. Results indicated that the widowed continued to talk, think, and feel emotions about their lost spouse decades later. Twenty years postloss, the widowed thought about their spouse once every week or 2 and had a conversation about their spouse once a month on average. About 12.6 years postloss, the widowed reported feeling upset between sometimes and rarely when they thought about their spouse. These findings add to an understanding of the time course of grief.