As noted earlier, almost all human studies, including this one, rely on measurement of self-reported stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms that likely reflect persistent maternal attributes and may not be closely related to the prevalence or severity of
stressful events. In the single instance in which developmental outcomes were followed after a natural emergency (Laplante et al., 2004), maternal perceptions of the stressfulness of the event were unrelated to child outcomes; instead, the magnitude of actual disruption to daily life as a result of the emergency was the significant predictor (Laplante et al., 2004).Thus we believe that the data generated by both
rodent and nonhuman primate models regarding stress effects on offspring do not provide parallel to studies that measure maternal psychological characteristics.