Prenatal Determinants of Behaviour

Prenatal Determinants of Behavior describes the methods of research on events in the maternal environment during gestation affecting the postnatal behavior of offspring by altering the intra-uterine environment of the fetus. This book is composed of 11 chapters that focus on methods of investigation rather than on substantive findings in the belief that progress in explaining behavior depends on researchers recognizing in the way in which they design experiments that behavior is determined by a multitude of complexly interacting events. After a brief introduction to the aspects of pregnancy, this book goes on examining the role of maternal influences and environmental factors, such as irradiation, drugs, hormone, and nutrition, on postnatal offspring behavior. The discussion then shifts to methods of altering the emotional state of a mother that affect her physiological condition indirectly. Other chapters survey the principles and experimentation of the genotype-environment interaction and its influence of offspring behavior. The last chapters deal with human studies concerning the influence of a variety of prenatal variable on the growth, health, and behavior of human offspring, including smoking, maternal environment, nutrition, diseases, X-rays, drugs, and stress. This book will be of great value to psychiatrists and medical professionals and students.