Pre-natal alcohol exposure (PAE) can lead to the development of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD). Individuals with FASD have a range of neurodevelopmental impairments including learning difficulties, social impairment and difficulties in regulating behaviours. This study aims to understand how different levels and types of maternal alcohol consumption impact the development of multiple risk behaviours at adolescence. Multiple risk behaviours (MRBs) are typically harmful behaviours such as alcohol consumption that tend to accumulate in adolescence and may have lasting impacts on the health and wellbeing of the individual. This project is a continuation of a Public Health Masters study (B3903), to apply statistical methods to evaluate and address the impact of missing data.

Hypomania is a state of unusually energetic, high or irritable mood which lasts at least 4 days in a row. Hypomania can accompany depressive episodes as part of the course of bipolar disorder. There is evidence that suggests that maternal depression in pregnancy and the postnatal period is associated with various mental health outcomes in their children, including depression and psychotic symptoms as teenagers. However, little is known about how maternal depression in pregnancy and the postnatal period may relate to hypomania. This project will investigate whether maternal depression in pregnancy and the postnatal period is linked to their children’s hypomania when they are young adults.

Academic Pressure can be defined as fear of failure, concerns about the future, stress about workload and exams, worries about parental expectations, and competition with peers for grades. The UK has some of the highest levels of academic pressure in secondary schools, and this has risen in recent decades. Despite widespread concerns about academic pressure in the UK, it has rarely been investigated in relation to adolescent mental health. This project will investigate whether academic pressure is a modifiable causal risk factor for adolescent depression, self-harm and suicide. If so, academic pressure could be targeted in universal interventions in schools, to prevent adolescent depression, self-harm and suicide.

Prenatal depression presents a burden and potential risks for the expecting women (Chung et al., 2001; Kim et al. 2013) and may have long-term consequences for the child regarding their cognitive, behavioural, and emotional development (Madigan et al., 2018; Rogers et al., 2020). However, there is a lack of large-scale studies investigating the relationship between prenatal maternal depression and child behavioural and emotional development that control for a common set of relevant potential confounding variables. In this project, we aim to study the effects of prenatal maternal depression on children’s long-term behavioural development and mental health, leveraging large-scale, multi-cohort data in the EU Child Cohort Network. As a secondary objective, we plan to disentangle the effects of pre-pregnancy, prenatal and postnatal depression on offspring development. The strength that comes with studying this research question in the LifeCycle cohort is the large amount of harmonised, multi-cohort data available, which allows us to investigate offspring outcomes over time while also controlling for relevant confounding factors. Furthermore, rather than focusing on a single behavioural outcome, our approach will be comprehensive in that it will examine a range of measures including cognition, internalising and externalising behaviour, and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This can aid our understanding of symptom profiles for children prenatally exposed to maternal depression.

Examing the factors which shape social cognition (e.g., psychosis-like symptoms and emotional recognition) may help in understanding the precursors for later psychiatric disorders (e.g., schizophrenia) and potentially aid in identifying at-risk individuals and populations. Aspects of the local neighbourhood - such as crime rates and the state of the built environment - may shape our social cognition and therefore be an important modifiable risk factor for the development of such thoughts and behaviours. For instance, levels of threat in the local environment (e.g., crime and antisocial behaviour) may increase the risk of developing paranoid symptoms, a precursor for schizophrenia.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic had an immense impact on people’s lives worldwide. This may be particularly true for those with mental health issues. In the UK, presentations to hospitals for self-harm decreased markedly during the early period of the pandemic, before returning to normal levels (Paterson et al., 2023). This reduction was also reported in a systematic review (John, Eyles et al. 2020). However, one study found increased cases of self-harm thoughts in the emergency department, particularly for adolescent females (Sara, Wu et al. 2023). Patterns also differed according to factors such as socioeconomic status and age (Sara, Wu et al. 2023).

Results from a population-based survey suggest that suicidal thoughts and anxiety disorders increased during the pandemic, particularly among young adults, lower socioeconomic groups, and those with a history of mental health conditions (O'Connor, Wetherall et al. 2021). However, a population-wide data linkage study found unchanged patterns among individuals aged over 65 years, people living alone, or residents of affluent areas (Paterson et al., 2023). In another study, factors found to influence hospital presentations for self-harm during COVID-19 in the UK included COVID-19 infection, lockdown restrictions, limited access to psychiatric healthcare services, isolation, and mental health problems (Hawton, Lascelles et al. 2021).

The objective of this project is to identify the factors associated with self-harm thoughts and behaviours among young adults in the ALSPAC cohort during COVID-19. The study will contribute to the existing literature by using ALSPAC pre and post-pandemic data, collected prospectively, to identify different risk factors for self-harm thoughts and behaviours in the population. We will examine ten different risk factors related to self-harm thoughts and behaviours including participants’ demographics, mental health and personality, physical factors, and protective factors.

This project will aim to summarise the dietary patterns of the two generations of ALSPAC. The same food frequency questionnaire was administed to both the parents and their 30 year old offspring. Dietary patterns allow us to look at the diet as a whole rather than individiual foods or nutrients to provide an overall summary of dietary intake. Principal Components Analysis will be used - this method uses the existing correlations between food groups to identify those foods and gfood groups that are commonly consumed in combination.

Parenting is a broad term collating a host of behaviors and emotional responses to one's children. Sensitive and adaptive parenting is considered to reflect the parent's capacity for empathy, i.e., the ability to understand and share in the emotions of others. Interestingly, individual's differences in both parenting and empathy can be partially explained genetic factors. Yet it is still unknown whether genetic predisposition toward empathy can also explain differences in parenting. This project seeks to answer these questions by calculating individuals' empathy polygenic score, that is a score of their genetic potential for empathy, based on a previous genome wide study (N= 46,861, Warrier et al., 2018), and then to examine whether this score is associated with better parenting as measured by questionnaires within the ALSPAC cohort. This study promises to enhance our comprehension of the genetic dimensions of parenting and their interconnectedness with empathy as a fundamental trait. By unraveling these intricate connections, we can foster a more nuanced understanding of the complexities shaping parenting behaviors at the genetic level.

Attachment insecurity (e.g., attachment avoidance and anxiety) is a fundamental characteristic linked to how people engage with and experience power dynamics inherent in social relationships. Social power motives (e.g. dominance, prestige) also predict various behaviours, preferences for, and experiences of social relationships, many of which overlap those connected to attachment insecurity. However, there is no extant work directly linking attachment insecurity to social power motives.

Yet there is ample evidence to hypothesize a relationship. The power motives are associated with the quality and outcomes of various close relationships, including friendships and romantic partnerships. A stronger general power motive in men is linked to breakups, intimate partner violence, and sexual coercion in romantic relationships. In non-romantic friendships, power motives predicts fewer dyadic interactions, increased frustration and guilt in friendship episodes, and more instrumental, assertive, and self-expansive striving in friendship. Similar outcomes have also been linked to differences in adult attachment orientations, suggesting a possible link between power motives and attachment orientations. On the other hand early-life attachment insecurity is also related to important later life outcome variables, such as antisocial behaviour and mental health. Might this relationship be mediated by individuals’ goals are and the way they behave, which are captured by dimensions of social power?

The aims of this project are to look at several factors in an individual’s upbringing, including attachment style, parental personality, socioeconomic status, and parental dynamics, to see how these factors are linked to dominance and prestige seeking personality traits, as well as life outcome variables.