A pilot study has found that pregnant women who have suffered from mental health such as depression or bipolar disorder (i.e. both mania and depression) recognise babies’ faces and how babies laugh or cry, differently to healthy controls.
This happens even if they are not currently experiencing depressive or manic symptoms and may represent an early risk-factor for children of these women, although the authors stress that research would be needed to confirm any long-term effects. This work is presented at the ECNP Congress in Barcelona.
Figures show that nearly 8 per cent of Europeans (EU) have suffered from depression in the previous 12 months, with the rate of depression in women (9.7 per cent) being around 50 per cent higher than the rate in men. Around 1 per cent of Europeans have suffered from bipolar disorder in the previous 12 months*. With over 5.1 million births in the EU every year, a significant number of the women who become pregnant will suffer from depression or bipolar disorder.
Researchers compared 22 pregnant women, currently well but with a history of depression, and seven with bipolar disorder who were also currently well, against 28 healthy pregnant women. They also tested 18 non-pregnant women, as controls.
Between the 27th and 39th weeks of pregnancy, all the women were tested for how they responded to a series of happy or sad faces, and to laughter and crying, of both babies and adults. Specifically, the women were asked to rate how happy or distressed the infants were based on infants’ facial and vocal displays of emotion (including smiles, laughter and cries). They were also asked to identify adult facial expressions of emotion (including happiness, sadness, fear and disgust) across varying intensity levels.
According to lead researcher, Dr Anne Bjertrup (Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen) said: “In this study, we found that pregnant women with depression or bipolar disorder process infants’ facial and vocal signals of emotion differently even when they are not currently experiencing a depressive or manic episode. These differences may impair these women’s ability to recognise, interpret and respond appropriately to their future infants’ emotional signals.”
The researchers found that, compared to healthy pregnant women:
- Pregnant women with bipolar disorder had difficulty with recognising all facial expressions and showed a “positive face processing bias”, where they showed better recognition of happy adult faces and more positive ratings of happy infant faces.
- In contrast, pregnant women with previous depression showed a negative bias in there cognition of adult facial expressions and rated infant cries more negatively.
Anne Bjertrup continu