ABSTRACT
Our research is beginning to uncover gender differences in the socioemotional reactions and behavior of infant sons and daughters of mothers with a history of depression. These findings are arising out of our work on the effects of maternal depression on infant development and our work on gender differences in the behavior of sons and daughters of well mothers (Weinberg & Tronick, 1998; Weinberg, Tronick, Cohn, & Olson, 1999). These two lines of research naturally converged on the question of whether or not infant sons and daughters of depressed mothers might be differentially affected by the socioemotional behavior of their depressed mothers. Gender differences in infant reactions to depressed affect is a critical question to evaluate if we are to understand differences in the forms of psychopathology manifested by boys and girls. Given our findings on the effects of depression and the affective and regulatory differences of boys and girls, we hypothesized that boys would be more vulnerable to the effects of maternal depression than girls would be (Tronick & Weinberg, 1997). To put it differently, boys would be more reactive to maternal depression than would girls. Indeed, these are the differences that we seem to be finding in these studies of the infant sons and daughters of depressed mothers, which were supported by grants from the Prevention and Intervention programs at NIMH.
