Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Background: Over 10% of Canadian women experience depression in the early years of their child's life (Public Health Agency of Canada, 2012). These children have elevated risk for physical and mental health problems (e.g. Murray et al., 2003). A potential mechanism accounting for this risk is the abnormal hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) activity, shown by atypical cortisol levels, in depressed women and their children. The HPA programming hypothesis states that the HPA axis is programmed early in life, and is influenced by maternal HPA activity and psychological (e.g. depressed) states. Objectives: 1) Delineate how maternal depression and maternal HPA activity influences child HPA activity across development; 2) determine how children's HPA activity, in association with other child features (i.e. emotion regulation), explains children's emotion and behavior difficulties. Method: The sample will be drawn from the CIHR-funded Maternal Adversity, Vulnerability and Neurodevelopment (MAVAN) project, which is an ongoing study of 150 depressed and 100 healthy control mother-child dyads, assessed prenatally and thereafter. Mother-child dyads have already participated in 5 stressful tasks across development, during which cortisol was sampled. Dyads will return for a follow-up visit-children are now approximately 7 years old. During this visit, dyads will participate in a stressful task and cortisol will be collected. Maternal depression and child emotion and behavior problems will be assessed using an interview and self-report measures. During all study visits children's emotion regulation strategies will be coded. Implications: This study will elucidate longitudinal effects of maternal depression on child HPA activity and emotion regulation ability. This research will be informative for determining sensitive periods of HPA programming, which can be applied to interventions for at-risk children, to decrease the transgenerational transmission of depression.