Infant Sex Moderates the Effects of Maternal Pre‐ and Postnatal Stress on Executive Functioning at 8 Months of Age

Previous studies report that early life stress, including maternal pre‐ and postnatal stress, has adverse effects on cognitive development and that these associations might be sex‐specific. However, no studies exist on early life stress and infant executive functioning (EF). The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between maternal pre‐ and postnatal stress and infant EF, and whether these associations are moderated by infant sex. Maternal prenatal depressive, general anxiety, and pregnancy‐specific anxiety symptoms were measured three times, and postnatal depressive and general anxiety symptoms were measured 6 months postpartum. Infant EF was assessed with a modified A‐not‐B task 8 months postpartum (N = 214). Maternal postnatal general anxiety predicted poorer EF in girls in comparison with boys. Moreover, there was a trend toward an interaction between prenatal anxiety and infant sex such that prenatal anxiety predicted infant EF differently in girls and in boys. No association was found between depressive symptoms or pregnancy‐specific anxiety symptoms and infant EF. These findings suggest that maternal anxiety may have sex‐specific effects on early EF and that pre‐ and postnatal stress may differently affect infant EF/cognitive development. The implications of these findings and important future directions are discussed.     

A Stain on the White Uniform — The Discursive Construction of Nurses' Industrial Action in the Media

This article focuses on the discursive construction of the nursing profession in the context of an industrial action. Drawing on studies that claim that the diffusion of new public management reforms restructure healthcare professions and on feminist studies arguing that gender is crucial to understanding the concepts and processes of this restructuring, the article examines a media debate surrounding a recent labour dispute in the Finnish healthcare sector. The analysis illustrates how the nursing profession was discursively constructed through a negotiation of individual and societal rights and responsibilities, and how the debate was framed by competing and contested discourses of professionalization, caring, labour markets and new public management. As a consequence, the debate both sustained and reproduced the traditional gendered meanings related to the nursing profession, as well as provided a context for unsettling, at least for a moment, the normative gender order of Finnish society.     

A Transactional Model of Temperamental Development: Evidence of a Relationship between Child Temperament and Maternal Stress over Five Years

Although there is growing consensus that parental stress is a risk factor in child development, longitudinal studies of its effects are few. This study tested a sample of 231 mother–child dyads in terms of whether the relations between the global experience of stress in mothers (perceived stress scale) and child temperamental characteristics (infant behavior questionnaire and child behavior questionnaire) could be conceptualized through transactional models of development. The assumption was that higher negative emotionality and lower positive affectivity in the infants would contribute to an increase in maternal stress over a five‐year period, beginning in infancy, and that higher maternal stress would contribute to an increase in child negative affectivity and a decrease in positive affectivity and self‐regulation over the same period. Evidence was found for both hypotheses, but not within the same models: the effect of maternal stress on child temperamental development was greater. The results are discussed with reference to bidirectional models of temperamental development.