Chronicity and severity of maternal postpartum depression and infant sleep disorders: a population-based cohort study in southern Brazil

A cohort study was conducted with 397 women randomly selected from the Brazilian National System of Public Health, to describe the prevalence rates of infant sleep problems at 12-month of life, and its association with chronicity and severity of maternal depressive symptoms. Mothers were assessed, first, from the 9th to the 12th week postpartum and then at 12 months after delivery, with EPDS and a self-rating questionnaire regarding babies’ sleep behavior. After controlling for possible confounders, babies whose mothers had severe chronic depressive symptoms were at higher risk for sleep disorder at 12 months of birth.     

Moral chronicity and social information processing: Tests of a social cognitive approach to the moral personality

Following Higgins, King, and Mavin (1982) chronicity paradigm, we examined the effects of chronically accessed moral constructs for prototypic moral character using two different research paradigms, spontaneous trait inferencing and lexical decision. Study 1 presented target sentences in a deliberate or spontaneous processing condition. Recall was cued with either a dispositional or semantic cue. Moral chronics made more spontaneous trait inferences with dispositional cues than semantic cues. In Study 2, participants read stories about characters who did or did not help. Moral chronics were faster responding to probes reflecting negative evaluations of story characters who did not help when requested (e.g., “disloyal”). Findings support claims that the moral personality is usefully conceptualized in terms of the chronic accessibility of moral knowledge structures.     

Postnatal depression and infant cognitive and motor development in the second postnatal year: The impact of depression chronicity and infant gender

A large body of literature has investigated the effects of postnatal depression on infant development. However, the particular circumstances in which depression is associated with adverse effects remain unresolved. Factors, such as the nature of depression (e.g., duration and severity) and the context with respect to other risk and protective factors (e.g., socioeconomic status and child gender) have been suggested as moderators of the effects of postnatal depression on infant outcomes. This study examined the impact of brief and chronic depression in a non-poverty sample of 112 mothers and their infants. Infant language development was assessed at 12 months, and at 15 months the Bayley Scales of Infant Development-II were administered. Chronic maternal depression, lasting throughout the first 12 months postpartum and beyond, was associated with lower infant cognitive and psychomotor development, with the effects being similar for boys and girls, while brief depression did not significantly impact the infant performance. Language development and infant behavior during testing were equivalent across the groups. The relatively high rates of motor development delay associated with chronic maternal depression found in this study are discussed along with the methodological issues and models of cumulative risk.