Depression screening may not capture significant sources of prenatal stress for Black women.

Exposure to stress during pregnancy, including depression, has a significant impact on maternal health. Black women experience varied stressors that impact pregnancy outcomes. Although the move to engage in universal screening of women for depression is a positive step toward improving women's health, it has been deployed without a comprehensive examination of its utility for capturing exposure to other stressors with known associations with perinatal and neonatal health problems for Black women such as discrimination stress. In the present study, we examine the overlap between several sources of stress and a positive screen on the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) in Black pregnant women. Data were gathered from a study examining the effects of stress on prenatal health (N = 168). Discrimination stress, structural and systemic racism stress, perceived stress, and partner abuse were measured using standardized questionnaires during pregnancy. Using a score of ≥ 13 to indicate probable depression the sensitivity of the EPDS to identify women who experienced high levels of discrimination stress (41.7%), structural and systemic racism (39.5%), perceived stress (63.4%), and partner abuse (45.2%) was suboptimal. Lowering the threshold for a positive screen on the EPDS to a score of 10 improved sensitivity but did not solve the problem of under-identification of women whose health is at risk. The focus on depression screening for pregnant women should be re-considered. A screening toolkit that more rigorously and broadly assesses risk and need for support and intervention is needed to improve perinatal health outcomes for Black women.

Maternal socialization of emotion and the development of emotion regulation in early adolescent girls.

Regulation of negative emotions is a core competency of child development. Parental emotion socialization profoundly influences later capacity to regulate negative affect in childhood and adolescence. The present study examined the effects of maternal emotion socialization on the development of emotion regulation in the context of a longitudinal study of 210 mother-daughter dyads. Dyads completed a conflict resolution task when the child was age 11 years during which maternal warmth and hostility were coded. At ages 11 to 13 years, mothers completed self-report measures of supportive and nonsupportive responses to child negative emotion, and children completed self-reports of inhibition and adaptive regulation of sadness and anger. We used latent growth curve modeling to estimate changes in inhibition and adaptive regulation of sadness and anger over time; observed maternal warmth and hostility were included as time-invariant covariates and maternal self-report of supportive and nonsupportive responses were included as time-varying covariates. Observed maternal warmth was positively associated with girls' adaptive regulation of anger and sadness at age 11 years. Maternal self-reported supportive responses to girls' negative affect were positively associated with girls' adaptive regulation of anger, and nonsupportive responses were negatively associated with adaptive regulation of anger and sadness. These findings support the role of maternal emotion socialization and indicate specific effects of maternal warmth and supportive responses in the development of girls' capacity to modulate negative emotions during early adolescence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).