1 - (SYM 48) Intergenerational Transmission of Emotional Difficulties: The Role of Borderline Symptoms and Emotion Dysregulation During Pregnancy

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a high-risk diagnosis associated with emotional difficulties that can span generations. Emotion dysregulation is a core feature of BPD that may facilitate these intergenerational effects. Maternal emotion dysregulation has been found to predict newborn neurobehavioral outcomes that may be early signs of emotion dysregulation development. However, given that emotion dysregulation is a core feature of many psychopathologies, it is unclear whether maternal BPD symptoms distinctly influence offspring emotional development beyond maternal emotion dysregulation. Thus, we examined the effects of maternal prenatal BPD symptoms and emotion dysregulation on infant negative affect and dysregulation at 7 and 18 months postpartum, respectively. We also tested infant negative affect at 7 months as a mediator of the relation between maternal prenatal psychopathology and infant dysregulation at 18 months.

Data were collected from 247 mother-infant dyads. Mothers self-reported BPD symptoms and emotion dysregulation during pregnancy. Infant negative affect and dysregulation data were collected at 7 months and 18 months postpartum using parent-report measures.

We constructed a structural equation model to estimate paths between maternal BPD symptoms, maternal emotion dysregulation, infant negative affect, and infant dysregulation. Data were a good fit for the mode. We found that greater maternal BPD symptoms were associated with greater maternal emotion dysregulation during pregnancy (B = 9.71, p < .001). Even after accounting for emotion dysregulation, maternal BPD symptoms significantly predicted higher infant negative affect (B = .34, p = .009) at 7 months postpartum. Results also indicated that infant negative affect at 7 months mediated the relation between greater BPD symptoms during pregnancy and higher infant dysregulation at 18 months (B = .03, p = .02).

We found that maternal BPD symptoms during pregnancy predicted infant negative affect at 7 months and infant dysregulation at 18 months, even after accounting for maternal emotion dysregulation. We also found that infant negative affect mediated the relation between prenatal BPD symptoms and infant dysregulation. These results suggest that although emotion dysregulation is a core feature of BPD, other facets of BPD symptoms may contribute to the intergenerational transmission of emotional difficulties. We will discuss the implications of our findings in conceptualizing the development of psychopathology.