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Updated: Feb 27, 2026

Using a Murine Model of Psychosocial Stress in Pregnancy as a Translationally Relevant Paradigm for Psychiatric Disorders in Mothers and Infants
Published on: June 13, 2021
Maternal depressive symptoms during pregnancy are associated with amygdala hyperresponsivity in children
Noortje J F van der Knaap1, Floris Klumpers2,3, Hanan El Marroun4
1Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University Medical Centre, P.O. Box 9101, 6500 HB, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. n.vanderknaap@fcdonders.ru.nl.
Abstract:
Depression during pregnancy is highly prevalent and has a multitude of potential risks of the offspring. Among confirmed consequences is a higher risk of psychopathology. However, it is unknown how maternal depression may impact the child's brain to mediate this vulnerability. Here we studied amygdala functioning, using task-based functional MRI, in children aged 6-9 years as a function of prenatal maternal depressive symptoms selected from a prospective population-based sample (The Generation R Study). We show that children exposed to clinically relevant maternal depressive symptoms during pregnancy (N = 19) have increased amygdala responses to negative emotional faces compared to control children (N = 20) [F(1,36) 7.02, p = 0.022]. Strikingly, postnatal maternal depressive symptoms, obtained at 3 years after birth, did not explain this relation. Our findings are in line with a model in which prenatal depressive symptoms of the mother are associated with amygdala hyperresponsivity in her offspring, which may represent a risk factor for later-life psychopathology.
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