Estimating the Roles of Genetic Risk, Perinatal Risk, and Marital Hostility on Early Childhood Adjustment: Medical Records and Self-Reports

Abstract

A wide variety of perinatal risk factors have been linked to later developmental outcomes in children. Much of this work has relied on either birth/medical records or mothers’ self-reports collected after delivery, and there has been an ongoing debate about which strategy provides the most accurate and reliable data. This report uses a parent-offspring adoption design (N = 561 families) to (1) examine the correspondence between medical record data and self-report data, (2) examine how perinatal risk factors may influence child internalizing and externalizing behavior at age 4.5 years, and (3) explore interactions among genetic, perinatal risk, and rearing environment on child internalizing and externalizing behavior during early childhood. The agreement of self-reports and medical records data was relatively high (51–100%), although there was some variation based on the construct. There were few main effects of perinatal risk on child outcomes; however, there were several 2- and 3-way interactions suggesting that the combined influences of genetic, perinatal, and rearing environmental risks are important, particularly for predicting whether children exhibit internalizing versus externalizing symptoms at age 4.5 years.

The Importance of the Prenatal Environment in Behavioral Genetics: Introduction to Special Issue

“…The papers by Knopik et al (2016) and Neiderhiser et al (2016) both address the value of self-report data for assessment of the prenatal environment. In both projects self-report data were collected retrospectively, but other strategies were also used to enhance both the accuracy of the self-report data and the detail of the information collected.…”

Perinatal complications are associated with social anxiety: Indirect effects through temperament

“…It is difficult to determine the accuracy of the mother's recollections of the events that occurred during and before birth, and it is possible that mothers with anxiety disorders may be prone to recall more problems during their pregnancies. However, past studies demonstrate that maternal recollection of birth complications is valid particularly for complications like the ones described in this study and among highly educated families (Bat-Erdene et al, 2013;Buka et al, 2004;Coolman et al, 2010;Neiderhiser et al, 2016). Future studies should carefully measure maternal traits and characteristics, incorporate multiple informants, and include behavioural measures for temperament assessment.…”

“…This result is in line with studies in adults that find that poor obstetric outcomes, such as low birthweight and preterm birth, are associated with less adaptive socioemotional and personality development, typically characterized by low extraversion, higher shyness, and BI (Allin et al, ; Schmidt et al, ). Furthermore, obstetric complications and preterm birth seem to be more strongly associated with anxiety disorders (Essau et al, ; Freed et al, ), especially when coupled with other risk factors (e.g., maternal hostility; Neiderhiser et al, ). In contrast, other factors, such as maternal substance use during pregnancy (e.g., smoking), are more strongly related to externalizing and attention problems (Wakschlag et al, ; Weissman, Warner, Wickramaratne, & Kandel, ).…”

The Effect of Smoking during Pregnancy on Severity and Directionality of Externalizing and Internalizing Symptoms: A Genetically Informed Approach

“…To include both externalizing and internalizing symptoms in the same model without issues of multicollinearity (correlation of 0.49, p < 0.001), we conducted a principal component analysis of the externalizing and internalizing multi-rater scores to create symptom severity and directionality scores [27,29]. The severity score represents what the two scores have in common, i.e., symptom severity, regardless of whether the symptoms fall on the internalizing versus externalizing spectrum.…”

“…In most studies, the effect of SDP on these behaviors has usually been studied separately because of the collinearity problem if both measures are included simultaneously into the model [27]. A handful of studies on externalizing and internalizing behavior have addressed this issue by creating (I) a severity score of the two domains that represents what the two domains have in common, and (II) a directionality score that represents how the domains differentiate, that is, whether the child has a propensity towards externalizing vs. internalizing problems regardless of symptom severity [24,[27][28][29]. These scores are orthogonal and can be analyzed separately.…”