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Updated: Jun 10, 2026

Psychophysiological Assessment of the Effectiveness of Emotion Regulation Strategies in Childhood
Published on: February 11, 2017
Gene-environment interaction of child temperament
Jose Luis Ivorra1, Julio Sanjuan, Manuel Jover
1Department of Genetics, Faculty of Medicine, Valencia University, Spain.
Objective:
The aims of this study were to review studies on the molecular genetics of child temperament and prospectively analyze infant temperament as a function of the interaction between infant and mother: 5-HTT, DRD4, and MAO-A functional polymorphisms and the mother's emotional state.
Method:
A prospective study of 317 newborns and their mothers was performed. Infant temperament and the mother's anxiety and confidence in caregiving were evaluated at 8 and 32 weeks after childbirth using the Mother and Baby Scale. The mother's emotional state was evaluated using the Edinburgh Postpartum Depression Scale and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. These variables were correlated with 5-HTTLPR and Stin2 variants in the 5-HTT gene and the DRD4 variable number tandem repeats Exon 3 and MAO-A variable number tandem repeats genotypes of both the infants and their mothers.
Results:
The irritability scores of infants with the 5-HTTLPR s allele showed a linear relationship with their mothers' anxiety of caregiving at 8 (p = .011) and 32 weeks (p = .001), whereas the irritability of infants carrying the HTTLPR ll genotype was independent of their mothers' anxiety.
Conclusions:
The review of the literature in this field and the results of this study support that the 5-HTTLPR polymorphism moderates the influence of the mother's anxiety on infant irritability.
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