The significance of attachment and depression for expectant mothers' neural responding to infant emotional expressions

The significance of insecure attachment representations and depressive symptoms for neural responding to infant facial expressions was examined in 201 first-time expectant mothers (M age = 29.53 years; SD = 4.67; range = 18–43; 83.08 percent non-Hispanic White). Attachment variation was associated with both the strength (i.e., amplitude) and timing (i.e., latency) of early- and late-stage neural responding to infant facial emotional expressions implicated in orientation (P100), encoding (N170), attention (P300), and sustained processing (LPP), whereas depressive symptoms were only associated with the timing of neural responding to infant facial emotional expressions, including early encoding (N170) and later attention (P300; partial R2 = .01–.02). By including the two most widely investigated risks for neural responding to infants in the same study of expectant women, as well as a comprehensive set of ERPs (P100, N170, P300, and LPP) elicited during the same task, findings clarify the distinct, non-overlapping relations between these psychological risks and neural responding to infant facial expressions prior to infant birth.