From Science News:
“The study, led by Cory Burghy of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, drew from the Wisconsin Study of Family and Work, which in 1990 recruited pregnant women in southern Wisconsin at prenatal visits. Three times during the first year of their babies’ lives, the mothers reported whether they were experiencing stressful situations such as depression, marital conflict, money woes or parenting stress. Researchers assumed that women who reported higher stress levels created a more stressful situation for their baby.
“Four and a half years later, daughters whose moms reported higher levels of stress had more of the stress hormone cortisol in their blood. That observation suggests the girls had trouble shutting down a hyperactive stress response. The same effect wasn’t found in boys.
“Fourteen years later, effects of that high cortisol also turned up in the daughters’ brains: The behavior of two brain regions involved in regulating emotions — the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala — were out of sync in women who had high cortisol levels as children, brain scans revealed. Usually, the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala operate in tandem, a joint effort that seems to be involved in shutting down negative emotions. But in these women, those two brain areas lost that connection. And the weaker this connection, the more likely a daughter was to have problems with anxiety, the researchers found.”
So, fathers be good to your daughters.
