Developmental Psychology Research Group

The DePsy research group is featured in an upper secondary school textbook on developmental psychology published late last year, written by Suvi Hoffman, Kristiina Holm and Vesa Åhs. The book is the second installment in the Motiivi series, which approaches its topics in a demonstrative manner by complementing knowledge based on current psychological research with a contemporary picture of its professional applications.

 

We collaborated with the authors as they were writing the chapter on research in developmental psychology, providing consultation on the current practices in our field including the kinds of phenomena we are interested in, the questions our research seeks to answer, and the methods we employ in answering them. Research assistants Antti Kuivaniemi and Niina Vähäaho also demonstrated their work with data collection on the ongoing Predo follow-up, which was neatly summarized on the page below (in Finnish only – apologies to our international readers).

We received the following comment from the authors:
“As authors of the book we were thrilled to open up a collaboration with The Developmental Psychology Research Group. The group was extremely helpful in providing us with knowledge, ideas and publications that influenced our creative process. We would like to thank the research group for the collaboration and inspiration that helped us in creating material that is current, interesting, and based on the latest scientific developments. This will benefit numerous upper secondary students in understanding this field of research for years to come.”
-Suvi Hoffman, Kristiina Holm & Vesa Åhs

Likewise, the DePsy group would like to thank the authors for the smooth and professional collaboration, we are very happy to have done our part to help inform and inspire future researchers and practitioners as well as anyone interested in developmental psychology!
/Ville Rantalainen

When a mother suffers from depressive symptoms during pregnancy, her child is more likely to have psychiatric problems in early childhood, as we show in our most recent article “Maternal Depressive Symptoms During and After Pregnancy and Psychiatric Problems in Children” published in the Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in January 2017.

In our large cohort study, maternal depressive symptoms during pregnancy predicted increased psychiatric problems in children.

This association was independent of maternal depressive symptoms at the time when the mother assessed the child, of perinatal and sociodemographic factors, of maternal history of depression before pregnancy, and of maternal cardiometabolic pregnancy disorders. Maternal depressive symptoms during pregnancy increased the risk of many different types of psychiatric problems in children, both internalizing problems (such as emotional problems, anxiousness and depressiveness, withdrawal, and somatic complaints) and externalizing problems (such as aggressive behavior and attention problems). Associations were similar in younger and older children. Maternal depressive symptoms were highly stable during and after pregnancy. If the mother was depressed throughout pregnancy and/or both during and after pregnancy, child psychiatric problems were especially increased.

Our study cohort, Prediction and Prevention of Pre-Eclampsia and Intrauterine Growth Retardation (PREDO), included 2,296 women and their children born in 2006-2010. The women were recruited to the study at their first antenatal visit at one of the ten participating antenatal clinics in Southern and Eastern Finland. Every two weeks during pregnancy, the mothers completed a questionnaire on their depressive symptoms. Child psychiatric problems were mother-rated at child age 1.9-5.9 years.

The current findings suggest that maternal depression during pregnancy is an independent risk factor for child psychiatric problems. The findings highlight the adverse effects of maternal depressive symptoms during and after pregnancy on child psychological development. Maternal depressive symptoms are very common during pregnancy, with over 20 % of pregnant women reporting clinically significant levels of depression.

Our findings suggest that assessment of maternal depressive symptoms should become a routine part of antenatal care, and interventions targeting the mental health of the expectant mother may benefit the well-being of both the mother and the child.

/ Marius Lahti
Docent, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology and Logopedics,
Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
E-mail: marius.lahti@helsinki.fi

We would like to warmly welcome our newest team member, Soili Marianne Lehto! Her background is in medicine, and she holds a clinical specialist degree in psychiatry. After completing her PhD in 2009, and being appointed as docent in experimental psychiatry at the University of Eastern Finland in 2010, she has worked as clinical lecturer and acting professor of psychiatry, and spent a year as a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford. Her research interests focus on characterizing how mental phenomena and the physiology of the human body interact, and discovering new ways to modulate the observed interactions (www.uef.fi/mindandbrain).

As part of the Developmental Psychology Research Group, Soili is excited to resume back to a full-time research post. At the group, her interests focus on the interaction of biological and psychosocial factors during pregnancy, and the impact of these factors on child development. Aside from her passion towards science, she loves all kinds of physical exercise, travelling and good books.  

“Evidence mounting for gene-by-environment interactions at the FKBP5 locus predicting psychiatric symptoms”, Thorhildur Haldorsdottir entitled her commentary in the December issue of Biological Psychiatry.

Haldorsdottir’s commentary was inspired by our recent study findings from the Helsinki Birth Cohort Study that were published in the same issue of Biological Psychiatry. In this article, Jari Lahti and colleagues exploited the circumstances that took place during World War II in Finland. These circumstances have given rise to a unique and objectively recorded early-life stress exposure: namely, early life stress that related to separation from biological parents in the childhood period and to temporary foster care (in families or institutions) abroad.

During World War II, nearly 80.000 Finnish children of varying ages and socioeconomic backgrounds were evacuated unaccompanied by their biological parents mainly to Sweden, but also to Denmark and Norway, to escape the strains of war.

Already some time ago, researchers in our DEPSY group went through the Finnish National Archives Registry. Of the 13.345 Helsinki Birth Cohort Study participants, 1.781 were identified to have been exposed to this type of early life stress at an average age of 5 years, for an average duration of 2 years. A series of our previous studies have demonstrated that as adults those exposed to this objectively recorded type of early life stress show a range of adverse health and other outcomes: increased risk of cardiometabolic and psychiatric disorders in later life, physiological feedback systems that are more attuned to psychosocial stress in midlife, and lower socioeconomic positions over the entire lifespan. Our further studies also show alterations in reproductive traits over the entire lifespan, and poorer neurocognitive functioning in early and late adulthood.

The new study by Lahti and colleagues demonstrate that FKBP5 polymorphisms (i.e., rs1360780, rs9470080, and rs9394309) and this objectively recorded early life stress interacted in predicting moderate to severe levels of depressive symptoms in midlife.

Depressive symptoms levels were consistently higher in those exposed to early life stress who carried one or two rare alleles of these three selected polymorphisms.

Haldorsdottir concludes in her commentary that “Despite the recent progress toward understanding this FKBP5-stress interaction, there are many questions that remain unanswered and ample room for future progress. Namely, further studies are needed to elucidate potential moderation effects of FKBP5 based on the type, timing, and duration of the environmental stressors and biological sex. A greater in-depth understanding of this interaction may ultimately translate into early detection of individuals at risk of developing a psychiatric disorder and guided preventative and treatment strategies to avoid the long-term negative effects of environmental stressors.” While our study moves beyond previous studies and provides further proof of the FKBP5-stress interaction, we couldn’t agree more with the Haldorsdottir’s conclusion.

/Katri Räikkönen

The little ones are counting the days to the arrival of Santa. The DePsy group is counting the days to our move from Siltavuori to the Meilahti campus. In less than 20 days – starting from January 2017 – Psychology at the University of Helsinki will be part of the Medical Faculty. Our physical move into the Meilahti campus and Haartman Institute (H3) is scheduled to take place in the fall of the forthcoming year. Our research laboratories will move a bit later – but no later than early 2018.

For over 10 years, Psychology was part of the Faculty of Behavioral Sciences, and before that we were part of the Faculty of Arts. While we enthusiastically look forward to moving into our new home base, we will of course miss our own old faculty, our Jugend-style brick building, and many colleagues who won’t be joining us. DePsy group has many fond memories of the times as part of the Faculty of Behavioral Sciences – countless hours at our desks, written manuscripts, grants, dozens of publications, first accepted publications on the path towards a PhD, PhD defenses, and studies planned and conducted at the Siltavuori Psychologicum premises.

Many may wonder why Psychology is making this move and why now. Many, however, think that this is an excellent step forward. Psychologists themselves took the first initiative. This initiative was inspired by the profiling action of psychological and philosophical sciences in Finland that was undertaken by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture last year. Psychology in Helsinki is heavily leaning towards life sciences. Hence, the hop to Medical Faculty seems very natural. It strengthens our already existing profile in behavioral life sciences and integrates training of health care professionals into one single unit. There certainly exist many pros – and very few cons.

DePsy will continue fruitful research collaboration with old friends in the Medical Faculty and hospitals of the Helsinki and Uusimaa Hospital District, and in the other universities and hospital in Finland. DePsy also welcomes new collaborations and collaborators on board. At the same time, DePsy wishes to thank the Faculty of Behavioural Sciences and wishes the best of luck to colleagues in Educational Sciences – Yet, we wish to point out that we are still physically very close to each other– only a 15-minute tram ride from Siltavuori to Meilahti.

DePsy also wishes to thank the international and national collaborators of contributions during the year of 2016 – the journey has been, and continues to be, very exciting. Most of all, however: if we didn’t have the  dedicated pregnant moms, dads, newborns, toddlers, children, adolescents, their parents, caregivers, kindergarten and school teachers, young and middle-aged adults, and the elderly participating in our studies, none of the research that we do would be possible. Thank You All! DePsy whishes You All a Happy Holiday Season and a prosperous New Year!

/Katri Räikkönen

Katri Savolainen from the Developmental Psychology Group is defending her PhD thesis Stress and cellular aging – Associations between stress-related factors and leukocyte telomere length this Wednesday.

It’s well established that stress can be harmful for one’s health, but the mechanisms linking stress with disease and early mortality are not fully understood. Katri worked on the Helsinki Birth Cohort Study, which comprises the 13,345 individuals born from 1934 to 1944 in Helsinki, Finland. Of this cohort, a random sample were invited to a clinical visit some ten years ago. These participants gave a blood sample, and from those blood cells we were able to study telomere length: the length of those bits of DNA which can be found at the end of chromosomes, that get shorter as the cell divides and seem associated with many aging-related diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases, stroke, and type 2 diabetes. It’s been suggested previously that stress could link to these illnesses through shortened telomere length.

In her thesis, Katri was able to show that contrary to what one would expect, personality dimensions, mental disorders, depressive symptoms, traumatic life events or stress reactivity – the way your individual hormonal system responds to a stressful situation – were largely unrelated to telomere length. However, those individuals who suffered the double burden of traumatic experience both early and later on in life, and those who had sleep apnea, did on average show shorter telomere length. In conclusion, it would seem that this wide array of stress-related factors are not associated with telomere length.

Read more about Katri’s research in Finnish, have a look at her thesis online, or come watch Katri defend her thesis on November 16th, at noon, at the University of Helsinki main building, lecture room 12 (Fabianinkatu 33)!

/Sara Sammallahti

Sleep Helsinki! in Nyt:

I would like to think the old “nature versus nurture” dispute is pretty much dead and buried in psychology. Instead, we are now trying to understand how nature AND nurture – our genetic material and our environment – together both shape us into who we are.

One way to look at the genetics of psychological traits is to do a genome-wide association study, or GWAS for short.

To put it simply, a GWAS is a study where we try to find out whether a specific trait (such as the risk of a certain disease, or a certain psychological trait) is associated with genetic variants – differences in our DNA.

These are usually huge international projects, where dozens of researchers combine data from tens or hundreds of thousands of people. Our group has also participated in some fascinating GWAS projects.

This year, we took part in showing how

• well-being, depressive symptoms, and neuroticism are associated with genetic variants (Okbay et al, Nature Genetics 2016)
• educational attainment, while mostly environmentally determined, is associated with genetic variants – and these genetic differences could affect, for example, our development during the fetal period (Okbay et. al, Nature 2016)
• a huge number of genetic differences may each play a small part in explaining why some people are more extroverted than others (van den Berg et. al, Behavior Genetics 2016)

What an exciting time to do psychological research!

/Sara Sammallahti

The Prediction and Prevention of Preeclampsia and Intrauterine Growth Restriction (PREDO) study cohort profile is now published in the International Journal of Epidemiology!

Predo is one of the big projects we have going on now. In total, 4,785 pregnant women participated in this study, which includes a clinical trial and a longitudinal cohort study to identify and prevent the risk factors for preeclampsia and intrauterine growth restriction, and to study their transgenerational consequences. Predo combines biomarker data from repeated samples with genomic and epigenomic information and measures of medical, psychological, environmental and socio-demographic characteristics in pregnant women, their partners and their children.

Right now, we’re inviting the school-age children and their parents to participate in the next follow-up phase – for more info in Finnish, visit the Predo site.

/Sara Sammallahti

Sleep Helsinki! is now recruiting 16-17 year-olds living in Helsinki, to take part in an exciting study on sleep and circadian regulation! Check out the study’s Facebook page or read a recent university news article on the study.