Jessica L Irwin

Applied Survey Research

The postpartum period brings a host of biopsychosocial, familial, and economic changes, which may be challenging for new mothers, especially those with trauma histories. Trauma-exposed women are at heightened risk for psychiatric symptomatology and reduced quality of life. The current study sought to evaluate whether a set of hypothesized promotive...

Findings from observational and experimental studies suggest that maternal inflammation during pregnancy is associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We report the first study in humans to examine this association in a large prospective birth cohort. We studied 788 mother-child pairs from the Seychelles Child Development Study Nutrition Cohor...

Immune dysregulation during pregnancy may influence behavior and neurodevelopment in offspring, but few human studies have tested this hypothesis. Using structural equation modeling, we examined associations between maternal inflammatory markers at 28 weeks gestation and child neurodevelopmental outcomes at 20 months of age in a sample of 1453 moth...

Prior studies of A:B::C:D verbal analogies have identified several factors that affect performance, including the semantic similarity between source and target domains (semantic distance), the semantic association between the C-term and incorrect answers (distracter salience), and the type of relations between word pairs. However, it is unclear how...

Capitalizing on a longitudinal cohort followed from gestation through adolescence (201 mother–child dyads), we investigate the contributions of severity and stability of both maternal depressive and perceived stress symptoms to adolescent psychopathology. Maternal depressive and perceived stress trajectories from pregnancy through adolescence were...

One of the key proposed agents of fetal programming is exposure to maternal glucocorticoids. Experimental animal studies provide evidence that prenatal exposure to elevated maternal glucocorticoids has consequences for hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis functioning in the offspring. There are very few direct tests of maternal glucocorticoids...

A longitudinal study of a sample of women and their offspring from two urban areas (N = 233) was conducted to test whether maternal prenatal anxiety trajectories from early to late pregnancy are associated with 12-month infant developmental outcomes, independent of maternal postpartum anxiety symptoms, prenatal and postpartum depressive symptoms, p...

Maternal psychosocial stress during pregnancy can adversely influence child development, but few studies have investigated psychosocial stress during the postpartum period and its association with risk of toddler developmental delays. Moreover, given the expanding diversity of the U.S. population, and well‐documented health and stress disparities f...

Very preterm birth (<32 weeks of gestation) heightens the risk for developmental and behavioral problems, but individual outcomes vary greatly. We evaluated whether mother-toddler dyadic interaction quality, assessed longitudinally at 14, 20, and 30 months (corrected), could account for unique variance in very preterm and full-term children’s menta...

The goal of this study was to evaluate whether there are sex differences in children's vulnerability to caregiving risk, as indexed by trajectories of maternal depressive symptoms assessed from 2 to 18 months’ postpartum, and children's rated attachment security in toddlerhood, adjusting for maternal social support and demographic risk. Analyses ut...

Developmental, neuropsychological, and computational studies have suggested the importance of both relational knowledge and working memory in analogical reasoning. In this study, we investigated the extent to which individual differences in working memory (WM) and crystallized knowledge (Gc) predicted accuracies on a visual analogy verification tas...

This study examined relationships among maternal reflective functioning, parenting, infant attachment, and demographic risk in a relatively large (N = 83) socioeconomically diverse sample of women with and without a history of childhood maltreatment and their infants. Most prior research on parental reflective functioning has utilized small homogen...