This is a selective review that provides the context for the study of perinatal affective disorder
mechanisms and outlines directions for future research. We integrate existing literature …

Ten to twenty percent of postpartum women experience anxiety or depressive disorders,
which can have detrimental effects on the mother, child, and family. Little is known about the …

Introduction: With∼ 4 million births each year in the United States, an estimated 760,000
women annually suffer from a clinically significant postpartum depressive illness. Yet even …

Quality of mothering relies on the integrity of multiple physiological and behavioral systems
and on two maternal factors, one proximal and one distal, that have a great impact on how a …

Parental care has a strong impact on neurodevelopment and mental health in the offspring.
Although numerous animal studies have revealed that the parental brain is a highly complex …

During the perinatal period, the brain is particularly sensitive to remodelling by
environmental factors. Adverse early‐life experiences, such as stress exposure or …

Recent evidence suggests that postpartum depression is associated with reduced amygdala
(AMY) response to negative stimuli. However, given the anhedonic features of PPD, it is …

Disengagement of emotion regulation circuits was previously shown in depressed mothers
and was hypothesized to underlie the impaired maternal–infant sensitivity described in …

Depressed mothers show negatively biased responses to their infants' emotional bids,
perhaps due to faulty processing of infant cues. This study is the first to examine depression …

This article is part of a Special Issue “Parental Care”. Early mother–infant relationships play
important roles in infants' optimal development. New mothers undergo neurobiological …