Over a number of years we have studied the phenomenology of maternal behavior from endocrine, neural, experiential, and ontogenetic perspectives. Here, we focus on the effects of early life experiences with and without the mother on subsequent maternal and non-maternal behaviors of the offspring. We have used an artificial rearing procedure, which entails removing rat pups from their mother and...

Variations in maternal care have been widely considered as a critical influence in development. In the rat, variations in maternal behavior, particularly in licking/grooming, regulate the development of endocrine, emotional and cognitive responses to stress. These studies form the basis of a potentially useful model for the study of maternal effects in mammals. In this paper we provide a detail...

OBJECTIVES We examined race/ethnicity and nativity correlates of prenatal substance use. METHODS Using data on a nationally representative cohort of pregnant women in US cities (N=4185), we evaluated the relative importance of socioeconomic status, paternal health behaviors, social support, and maternal stress and health history in explaining variations in prenatal substance use by race/ethni...

Health at birth is an important predictor of long-term outcomes, including education, income, and disability. Recent evidence suggests that maternal disadvantage leads to worse health at birth through poor health behaviors; exposure to harmful environmental factors; worse access to medical care, including family planning; and worse underlying maternal health. With increasing inequality, those a...

Previous studies have led to the assumption that maternal problems in reciprocal social behavior might play an important role in infantile aggression. This study investigated whether maternal problems in reciprocal social behavior were predictive of higher infantile aggression at 18 months of age, and whether maternal postpartum depressive symptoms mediated the association. Participants were 76...

Over 50% of mothers in rural Mexico have high depressive symptoms, and their children's health and development are likely to be negatively affected. A critical question is whether children vary in their vulnerability to the effects of high maternal depressive symptoms according to their indigenous ethnicity, maternal education, or household wealth. Our sample included 4442 mothers and 5503 chil...

This study examined the extent to which maternal attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms predict improvement in child behavior following brief behavioral parent training. Change in parenting was examined as a potential mediator of the negative relationship between maternal ADHD symptoms and improvement in child behavior. Seventy mothers of 6-10 year old children with ADHD under...

In many mammals, species-appropriate social behavior is necessary for an individual's ability to survive and reproduce. In the present study, we examined whether arginine-vasopressin (AVP) pathways that have been associated with social behavior differed between two closely related species of Peromyscus mice with different patterns of maternal behavior. We also tested whether individual levels o...

Caste differentiation and division of labor are the hallmarks of social insect colonies [1, 2]. The current dogma for female caste differentiation is that female eggs are totipotent, with morphological and physiological differences between queens and workers stemming from a developmental switch during the larval stage controlled by nutritional and other environmental factors (e.g., [3-8]). In t...

Does Medicaid Coverage for Pregnant Women Affect Prenatal Health Behaviors?* Despite plausible mechanisms, little research has evaluated potential changes in health behaviors as a result of the Medicaid expansions of the 1980s and 1990s. In this paper, we provide the first national study of the effects of Medicaid on health behaviors for pregnant women, which is a group of particular interest g...