Maternal stress during pregnancy linked to children’s social communication skills

Children whose mothers experienced high levels of stress during pregnancy and shortly after birth may face lasting challenges with social communication. A recent analysis indicates that early exposure to maternal hardship predicts poorer communication skills as youth progress from childhood into adolescence. The research was published in the journal Development and Psychopathology.

Social cognition is the broad ability to perceive, interpret, and respond to social information. It encompasses several distinct skills, including the capacity to recognize emotions in others and the ability to engage in reciprocal social communication. Emotion recognition typically emerges early in life and stabilizes during late childhood. In contrast, complex social communication abilities continue to mature well into adolescence.

The time before birth and the first few months of life represent a sensitive window for brain maturation. During this period, the developing nervous system is highly responsive to environmental inputs. Elevated maternal stress can lead to changes in fetal neurodevelopment, potentially by increasing the transfer of stress hormones across the placenta. This biological process can influence the growth of brain regions involved in social and emotional processing, such as the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala.

Past research has linked early adversity to various emotional and behavioral difficulties, but it has remained uncertain exactly how maternal stress affects specific types of social cognition. Theodora Kokosi, Marta Francesconi, and Eirini Flouri at University College London conducted this study to examine whether prenatal adversity influences distinct social skills differently. They specifically wanted to track these skills across multiple developmental stages, from middle childhood through late adolescence.

The researchers analyzed data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. This large study tracks the health and development of youth born in the United Kingdom in the early 1990s. The analytic sample for this investigation included 10,177 participants who had data available for at least one measure of social cognition.

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To gauge early adversity, mothers completed established checklists documenting stressful life events they had experienced. These inventories capture a variety of challenging situations, ranging from relationship difficulties to financial strain. The mothers filled out these surveys at 18 weeks of pregnancy and again at eight weeks postpartum. The researchers combined these responses to create a cumulative score of adverse life events spanning the early prenatal period through the first two months of the child’s life.

The first outcome the researchers evaluated was social communication. Parents completed a standardized checklist assessing their child’s social reciprocity and communication behaviors. This assessment occurred at four different time points: when the children were 8, 11, 14, and 17 years old.

The researchers found that higher maternal exposure to stressful life events was associated with poorer offspring social communication. This link held even after adjusting for factors like family socioeconomic status, maternal postpartum depression, and the child’s intelligence scores. The negative association between early adversity and social communication also widened slightly as the children aged from 8 to 17 years old.

The authors suggest that this widening gap might reflect the changing nature of social environments. As teenagers navigate increasingly nuanced social expectations, underlying communication difficulties may become more pronounced. Early disruptions to neural systems involved in social processing could make it harder for youth to keep up with these escalating demands.

The study also examined emotion recognition, which relies on different neurocognitive systems than social communication. At age eight, children completed a task evaluating their ability to identify emotions from static images. They viewed photographs of faces displaying fear, happiness, sadness, or anger, and they were asked to categorize the expression.

Maternal exposure to stressful life events was not related to the children’s performance on this facial emotion recognition test. Early life adversity did not appear to hinder or help a child’s ability to interpret basic facial expressions. The researchers note that static image tests might not always capture subtle changes in emotional processing.

At age 14, the teenagers completed a different type of emotion recognition assessment. This computer-based test required participants to identify emotions based on the movement patterns of abstract geometric shapes. For example, an animated triangle repeatedly jabbing at a circle was intended to convey anger.

In this case, greater maternal exposure to stressful life events from mid-pregnancy to the early postpartum period predicted slightly better performance on the movement-based task. While this result might seem counterintuitive, it aligns with certain developmental theories. Some researchers propose that individuals raised in unpredictable environments develop a heightened sensitivity to dynamic social cues as a way to adapt and survive.

There are a few caveats to consider when interpreting this research. The study relied on parent reports to measure the children’s social communication skills. This method can introduce subjective bias, as parents might interpret their children’s behaviors differently based on their own experiences or stress levels.

The study is also observational, which means it cannot prove that maternal stress directly caused the differences in social cognition. Other unmeasured environmental or genetic factors could contribute to the observed associations. Additionally, some participants dropped out of the longitudinal study over time, and this missing data could influence the statistical estimates of how communication skills change with age.

The measures used in the study also capture only a fraction of the broader concept of social cognition. Social cognition includes other sub-domains, such as the ability to understand different mental states or draw inferences about the causes of actions. It remains unknown if maternal stress influences these other specialized skills in the same way.

Future investigations could benefit from incorporating objective, observer-rated assessments of social communication to supplement parent reports. Researchers might also explore the biological mechanisms linking maternal stress to fetal brain development. Examining specific pathways, such as changes in immune function or stress hormone regulation, could clarify exactly how the early environment shapes lifelong social skills.

The study, “Prenatal exposure to stressful life events and offspring social cognition across childhood and adolescence,” was authored by Theodora Kokosi, Marta Francesconi, and Eirini Flouri.