Mothers’ Attachment is Linked to Their Children’s Anti-Inflammatory Gene Expression via Maternal Warmth

Abstract

Research has demonstrated links between adult romantic attachment and one's own physical health; little is known about links between adult attachment orientations and offspring health. Prior work has shown that parents' greater attachment anxiety and avoidance predicts less warmth toward their children. Extensive work has also shown that lower maternal warmth has negative downstream effects on offspring health. We tested the novel hypothesis that mothers' dispositional romantic attachment would be linked—via maternal warmth—to their children's expression of the glucocorticoid receptor gene NR3C1, higher expression of which is associated with healthier stress-regulation and inflammatory response. In a sample of 132 youth with asthma, we found that mothers' attachment anxiety and avoidance were both negatively associated with children's expression of NR3C1, explained by lower youth-rated maternal warmth. Effects held after adjusting for demographic and psychosocial covariates. Implications for parents' attachment influencing the health of offspring are discussed.

General Adaptation in Critical Illness: Glucocorticoid Receptor-alpha Master Regulator of Homeostatic Corrections

“…In late gestation of mammals, fetal glucocorticoid levels rise dramatically, an essential step for maturation in preparation for life after birth. Also, an association was found between greater maternal affection and warmth in early life and increased expression of glucocorticoid receptor genes in the offspring resulting in long-term health benefits (76).…”

Maternal attachment avoidance is linked to youth diurnal cortisol slopes in children with asthma

“…However, it remains unclear how this dyadic effect occurs. As maternal attachment avoidance is known to predict maternal responsiveness to children (Jones et al, 2015;Edelstein et al, 2004) and past research from our dataset had found that maternal warmth mediated links between maternal attachment avoidance and youths' expression of the glucocorticoid receptor gene NR3C1 (Stanton et al, 2017), we expected that it would be a plausible mediator in this study as well. However, in the subsample of youth who had cortisol data that we could include in these analyses, maternal warmth was not associated with maternal attachment avoidance nor diurnal cortisol slopes.…”

“…To our knowledge, only one other study (which also used the ALOFT study sample) has found a link between mothers' insecure attachment and their children's health-related biology: Stanton and colleagues (2017) found that maternal attachment avoidance was linked to reduced expression of the glucocorticoid receptor gene NR3C1 in their children via reduced maternal warmth as reported by the children (Stanton et al, 2017). The current study extends research on maternal attachment and youth health by showing that maternal attachment avoidance (but not anxiety) is linked to an additional form of irregularity in the HPA-axis.…”

“…Insecurely attached parents are less warm towards their children (Cowan, Cohn, Cowan, & Pearson, 1996;Adam, Gunnar, & Tanaka, 2004), and youth who experience harsher family climates characterized by less maternal warmth have poorer physical health outcomes later in life (Miller, Chen, & Parker, 2011). As noted above, maternal warmth has been found to mediate the relation between maternal attachment avoidance and expression of the glucocorticoid receptor gene in their children (Stanton et al, 2017).…”

Psychosocial experiences modulate asthma-associated genes through gene-environment interactions

“…The growing field of social genomics investigates how various dimensions of a person's social and psychological environment influence gene expression [24][25][26][27][28] . There is ample evidence for links between gene expression in blood and three major categories of psychosocial experiences: socioeconomic status (SES) 29 , social relationships [30][31][32] and emotionality 33,34 . Beyond single gene analyses, previous studies in this area [24][25][26] identified a pattern of differentially expressed genes referred to as the conserved transcriptional response to adversity (CTRA).…”