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Class Notes Early Development: Chances and Risks Psychology
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Lecture notes of 48 pages for the course Early development: Chances and Risks at RU (Class notes)
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Early Development: Chances and Risks(80 questions: choose the most correct sentence)
1. Introduction + Mini-lecture on biology
This course will focus on socio-emotional development of children - focus is on the first 1000
days which is the period spanning roughly between conception and one’s second birthday and
it’s really important. During this period, development proceeds at a breathtaking pace (really
fast).
We will also focus on how the environment affects child development; the role of nurture.
Years ago, it was believed that the environment is the supreme force in child development (it’s
all nurture!). Watson’s ideas are an example of behaviorism.
In some cases the environment influences to a large extent how we develop and our biology.
For example: the diet of bees with the same DNA determines whether the bee will be a queen
or a worker depending on whether they eat royal jelly or not. This is completely determined by
diet (environment).
We are not in the time of behaviorism anymore→now we are more trying to understand
how the environment impacts our expression of our biology.
For example, the range of reaction: biology gives a range of developmental possibilities
(children in enriched environments do better)
The question is not whether biological OR environmental factors are more important, but how
the expression of our biology is shaped by the environment we meet (‘programming’).
→We are programmed early in life for the environment that we are expected to meet.
The notion that programming (early environment can have a long lasting impact on the child)
is central to this course because early life is a critical/.sensitive period in development.
Environment will have more or less influence→depending on the developmental period:
● Critical period: environment only has an impact during a particular window, and
the effects are irreversible (if you glue a cat’s eye early in life for some time, he
will not be able to see from that eye ever again, but this not the case if you do it
later in life / goose follow the first one they see when they come out of the egg,
and this cannot be changed later on)
● Sensitive period: environment
changes/impacts a certain trait/behavior
to a larger extent than in other periods or
stages.
Early development is a sensitive period in life. If the
environment is full of stressors, the infant can be
impacted in a negative way long-term (vulnerable).
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, The first 1000 days of life contain risks with life-long consequences.
The DOHaD hypothesis (Developmental Origins of Health and Disease): Exposure to
certain environmental influences during critical/sensitive periods of development may
have significant consequences on an
individual’s short and long-term health. Early
development is the most important time to
intervene to prevent disease.
To study gene-environment contributions to
individual difference:
● Adoption studies: compare
characteristics of adopted children with
those of both their adoptive and
biological parents.
● Twin studies: compare the similarities
between identical and fraternal twins
reared together or apart.
Identical twins have identical genes, so if reared apart, any similarities they have must be
due to shared genes→this is FALSE: identical twins already share the prenatal
environment (the womb). So even if they are reared apart, they already have shared an
environment. Also, how much of that prenatal environment is shared depends on the
arrangements of the identical twins.
a) Dichorionic twins: separate placentas and separate fetal circulations (can be
identical or fraternal twins).
b) Monochorionic twins: one placenta and one fetal circulation (can only be identical
twins)→more complications and risk.
Identical twins can be monochorionic (MC) or dichorionic (DC). There is a greater
concordance for MC identical twins than for DC identical twins on: IQ scores, personality
scores, schizophrenia, physiological measures.
But even identical twins that shared the same placenta and shared the same circulation and
the shared same environment, they can still be different like in ⇒ conjoined twins (they have
different personalities)
SUMMARY
- Our biology and the environment interact, shaping our development.
- The first 1000 days play an important role in development.
- Probable that twin studies underestimated the influence of the prenatal
environment.
2. Prenatal Development
Sensitive period: window for the environment to shape fetal development.
Alcohol, drugs, medication, smoking… can affect offspring→these are referred to as
teratogens: agents that cause deviations during prenatal development (teratology or
developmental toxicity). They can cause malfunctions, but also manifestations such as growth
retardation and delays in mental development.
Some decades ago, society unfortunately learned a hard lesson about how medication can
have very severe effects on offspring ⇢ Thalidomide
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, (originally a tranquilizer, but then found to be an anti-emetic drug to treat morning
sickness) More than 10000 children were born with severe malformation to the limbs
(phocomelia) and around 40% died around birth. It took them 4-5 years to figure out
what was happening.
This thalidomide tragedy led to the development of greater drug regulation, especially
during pregnancy, and monitoring in many countries.
There are also effects of diet on pregnancy/offspring. Animal studies provide experimental
evidence on prenatal diet:
2 groups of mice were given either a normal diet or a poor diet (not low on nutrition but more
‘western’ fatty diet) during pregnancy. Then after pregnancy, in the postpartum period, in the
normal diet 2 groups were created where the offspring still received a healthy diet or a western
diet, in the poor diet also 2 groups were created with offspring having a healthy diet or poor
western diet. The group that lived the shortest life was the poor diet during pregnancy and
after with just 517 days. But what’s remarkable is that
the poor diet during pregnancy and the healthy diet
group only lived 568 days. Meanwhile the healthy
pregnancy poor diet group lived 715 days. And the
healthy pregnancy and healthy diet 765. There was
almost a difference of 200 between the healthy and poor
diet pregnancy groups. The diet during pregnancy had a
much stronger impact on the lifespan than what you eat
after. If you eat unhealthy during pregnancy and then eat
healthy as the child, you recover but not that much, even
if they ate 568 days of healthy nutrition.
Match-Mismatch Model: Evolutionary model that explains how a developing fetus
adapts in anticipation of the postnatal environment, as a result of cues experienced
prenatally.
(We are programmed during pregnancy for the environment after; if we grow up in a prenatal
environment low in nutrition, our whole body will become more efficient in digesting nutrition
and this means that if later on we are exposed to an unhealthy western diet we are more
prone to diabetes and obesity).
Your mother gives you information on how the environment looks and programmes you to
succeed in such an environment. But if that environment is different to the environment you
are exposed to later, you have a ‘match-mismatch’ and problems arise (obese children in
Africa). Thus offspring exposed to a poor diet/less food in utero ⇨ adapt to an environment
with less food ⇨ to increase the chances of survival and reproduction.
This theory provides an evolutionary basis for developmental programming, as we can adapt
to changing environments. The chances are more likely that you will be raised in an
environment that is similar to the one you experience in pregnancy and this makes us
susceptible. If we take information from the mom during pregnancy and adapt to that, we
increase our chances of survival; we adapt to certain environments and do well in them.
● Developmental mismatch: potential risk/cost of developmental programming.
(occurs when environmental cues in early life have limited validity, and thus
adaptive responses fail to correctly predict future environmental conditions)
Example: The Hunger Winter -The Dutch famine study (from 1944-1945
the NEtherlands was deprived of food and fuel, 22000 people died and the daily
ration 400-800 calories) The famine only lasted 5 months.
- Both boys and girls are lighter in birth weight when they’ve been exposed to
famine in late and mid gestation. But interestingly, babies conceived during
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, famine and born well after the famine ended had normal birth weights, probably
because their mothers were well-fed during the second and third trimester of
pregnancy.
- At the age of 50, the babies that were exposed to famine in early gestation (they
had normal birth weights) actually had been programmed; they are more obese,
more disturbed blood coagulation and higher rates of cardiovascular mortality.
- Famine exposure had huge effects on later health. These effects are dependent
on its timing during gestation and the organs and systems developing at that
time. Especially early gestation is a very sensitive period (also had more breast
cancer, depression, worse on cognitive tasks). But there was one potential
positive consequence which was an increased reproductive success in the
people conceived during the famine.
- Findings were NOT mediated by birth weight; prenatal nutrition can affect later
health without altering size of birth. The effects of famine exposure depend on its
timing.
- Important to note that: an effect of exposure to prenatal stress, war or exposure
to cold (no fuel) cannot be ruled out.
In sum, poor diet during pregnancy can have a negative effect on the offspring’s development.
This is still relevant today with many countries suffering from hunger, but interventions seem
promising:
- A daily snack providing additional green leafy vegetables, fruit and milk before
conception and throughout pregnancy had no overall effect on birth weight.
- Per-protocol and subgroup analyses indicated a possible increase in birth weight
if the mother was supplemented 3 months before conception and were not
underweight.
MATERNAL MENTAL HEALTH
(Research focused mostly on prenatal stress and anxiety, and to a lesser extent depression)
● Ask mothers using questionnaires: The estimation of the percentage of women
experiencing prenatal stress varies widely ➡ 8-12% of pregnant women meet
criteria for mental disorder, commonly an anxiety or mood disorder.
This might even be an underestimation, in a large-scale community study using
self-reports about 30% of pregnant women reported some type of stress.
In such studies (asking moms to fill in questionnaires and following them
overtime) there are outcomes when the child is born:
- Prenatal stress is related to negative affectivity, including crying.
- Related to more behavioral problems, including externalizing problems,
social behavior problems, and psychiatric symptoms.
- Worse cognitive outcomes, including working memory and IQ.
But self-report is not completely anonymous, reporter bias and some moms
underestimate their symptoms. Also, there is no effect of timing in prenatal
stress: stress, anxiety and depression are stable over pregnancy trimesters, it’s
always the same level throughout the pregnancy so it’s very difficult to look at
time using such a design.
● Investigate exposure to life events during pregnancy: Includes life events
such as death of a relative, accidents or life-threatening illnesses of a relative.
This way there is a possibility to tease apart, to some extent, the timing of the life
event (you can see in which trimester it happened; you can know that after it
happened there was a dark period but you can’t be sure that before that there
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