Discussion
The participants in this study were well-nourished,financially stable women with wanted pregnancies
who were not subjected to traumatic events during pregnancy nor displayed clinical levels of anxiety or depression. As such, these findings may not generalize to stressors in the external environment that may generate either more intense or prolonged physiological responses or to clinical populations of anxious or depressed women at the upper extreme of these continua. Later in this discussion we consider the manner in which these sample characteristics may support a curvilinear association between prenatal distress and outcome (Huether, 1998). Moreover,because the psychological measures were not implemented until the second half of pregnancy, we may have missed detecting first trimester effects that have been implicated as more potent for outcomes than later exposure, although research findings have been inconsistent in this regard (Van den Bergh,Mulder et al., 2005).