A Summary of the Article & Key Takeaways
We wanted to know whether we could identify strategies pregnant people could use to possibly buffer the effects of prenatal stress on newborn behavior. We recruited a sample of pregnant people with varying levels of emotion dysregulation. Adults experience emotion dysregulation when they experience their feelings as too intense to be managed, the emotions are mismatched to the environment, and when those emotions interfere with reaching their goals. We also asked our participants about the degree to which they use mindfulness strategies in their daily lives. We wanted to know if these mindfulness strategies could reduce the effects that emotion dysregulation had on the newborn. At birth, we used the NICU Network Neurobehavioral Scale (NNNS) to measure the neurobehavioral performance of the neonate. We chose to focus on newborn attention and arousal as our key outcomes. We found that mothers who had high levels of emotion dysregulation and low levels of mindfulness while pregnant had infants who had a hard time sustaining attention and orienting towards stimuli – like a ball or a rattle. On the other hand, women with high emotion dysregulation and who reported engaging in more mindfulness strategies had newborns with high attention. We did not find these associations when examining newborn arousal. We concluded that maternal mindfulness could “buffer” the effect of emotion dysregulation on newborn attention. This was an observational study, and so we cannot infer causality with these data.

Practitioners might recommend that pregnant people experiencing stress engage in some mindfulness activities. We also think that practitioners who work with stressed, pregnant people can discuss strategies they could use to improve their stress levels that might also have an effect on their baby. Thus, the caregiver can improve their own emotional health and that of their baby.