The long-term behavioural consequences of prenatal stress

Weinstock, Marta

doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2008.03.002

Cited by 931 publications

(781 citation statements)

References 166 publications

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“…Data from a variety of species have indicated that maternal exposure to environmental and social stressors can have detrimental impacts on their offspring's health and behaviour [41][42][43][44][45][46][47]. From a functional perspective, then, cooperation-even independent of any benefit associated with enhanced competitive ability-is linked to fitness and health, especially for females.…”

Section: The Adaptive Value Of Social Bondsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptations for social cognition in the primate brain

Platt

Seyfarth

Cheney

2016

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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One contribution of 18 to a theme issue 'The evolution of cooperation based on direct fitness benefits'. Studies of the factors affecting reproductive success in group-living monkeys have traditionally focused on competitive traits, like the acquisition of high dominance rank. Recent research, however, indicates that the ability to form cooperative social bonds has an equally strong effect on fitness. Two implications follow. First, strong social bonds make individuals' fitness interdependent and the 'free-rider' problem disappears. Second, individuals must make adaptive choices that balance competition and cooperation-often with the same partners. The proximate mechanisms underlying these behaviours are only just beginning to be understood. Recent results from cognitive and systems neuroscience provide us some evidence that many social and nonsocial decisions are mediated ultimately by abstract, domain-general neural mechanisms. However, other populations of neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex, striatum, amygdala and parietal cortex specifically encode the type, importance and value of social information. Whether these specialized populations of neurons arise by selection or through developmental plasticity in response to the challenges of social life remains unknown. Many brain areas are homologous and show similar patterns of activity in human and nonhuman primates. In both groups, cortical activity is modulated by hormones like oxytocin and by the action of certain genes that may affect individual differences in behaviour. Taken together, results suggest that differences in cooperation between the two groups are a matter of degree rather than constituting a fundamental, qualitative distinction.

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Section: The Adaptive Value Of Social Bondsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptations for social cognition in the primate brain

Platt

Seyfarth

Cheney

2016

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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“…(b) Hormone-mediated maternal effects: glucocorticoids Maternal corticosterone levels are also a good candidate in shaping an offspring's phenotype during development [175]. Corticosterone has been demonstrated to mediate long-term maternal effects between rodent mothers living under stressful conditions and their independent offspring.…”

Section: Hormones and Maternal Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hormonally mediated maternal effects, individual strategy and global change

Meylan¹,

Miles

Clobert

2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

101

108

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A challenge to ecologists and evolutionary biologists is predicting organismal responses to the anticipated changes to global ecosystems through climate change. Most evidence suggests that short-term global change may involve increasing occurrences of extreme events, therefore the immediate response of individuals will be determined by physiological capacities and life-history adaptations to cope with extreme environmental conditions. Here, we consider the role of hormones and maternal effects in determining the persistence of species in altered environments. Hormones, specifically steroids, are critical for patterning the behaviour and morphology of parents and their offspring. Hence, steroids have a pervasive influence on multiple aspects of the offspring phenotype over its lifespan. Stress hormones, e.g. glucocorticoids, modulate and perturb phenotypes both early in development and later into adulthood. Females exposed to abiotic stressors during reproduction may alter the phenotypes by manipulation of hormones to the embryos. Thus, hormone-mediated maternal effects, which generate phenotypic plasticity, may be one avenue for coping with global change. Variation in exposure to hormones during development influences both the propensity to disperse, which alters metapopulation dynamics, and population dynamics, by affecting either recruitment to the population or subsequent life-history characteristics of the offspring. We suggest that hormones may be an informative index to the potential for populations to adapt to changing environments.

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“…Adult amygdala function and emotional behavior are altered by PS (Weinstock, 2008;Sadler et al, 2011), and several studies have identified effects of PS on the developing amygdala (Kraszpulski et al, 2006;Laloux et al, 2012). However, no study to date has described how PS influences the developmental trajectory of amygdala function or characterized the effects of PS on amygdala neurophysiology, regardless of age.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prenatal Stress Alters the Development of Socioemotional Behavior and Amygdala Neuron Excitability in Rats

Ehrlich

Rainnie

2015

Neuropsychopharmacol

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Prenatal stress (PS) is a risk factor for neurodevelopmental disorders with diverse ages of onset and socioemotional symptoms. Some PS-linked disorders involve characteristic social deficits, such as autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia, but PS also promotes anxiety disorders. We propose the diversity of symptoms following PS arises from perturbations to early brain development. To this end, we characterized the effects of PS on the developmental trajectory of physiology of the amygdala, a late-developing center for socioemotional control. We found that PS dampened socioemotional behavior and reduced amygdala neuron excitability in offspring during infancy (at postnatal days (P)10, 14, 17 and 21), preadolescence (day 28), and adulthood (day 60). PS offspring in infancy produced fewer isolation-induced vocalizations and in adulthood exhibited less anxiety-like behavior and deficits in social interaction. PS neurons had a more hyperpolarized resting membrane potential from infancy to adulthood and produced fewer action potentials. Moreover, adult amygdala neurons from PS animals expressed larger action potential afterhyperpolarizations and H-current relative to controls, further limiting excitability. Our results suggest that PS can suppress socioemotional behavior throughout development and produce age-specific alterations to amygdala physiology.

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The long-term behavioural consequences of prenatal stress

Cited by 931 publications

References 166 publications

Adaptations for social cognition in the primate brain

Adaptations for social cognition in the primate brain

Hormonally mediated maternal effects, individual strategy and global change

Prenatal Stress Alters the Development of Socioemotional Behavior and Amygdala Neuron Excitability in Rats

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