Beyond Perinatal Mood: Breadth of Psychiatric Symptoms and Delay Discounting as Correlates of Mothers' Relational Reports from Pregnancy Through Adult Children

In 613 U.S. mothers across five family contexts, cross-domain psychiatric symptom burden (beta = 0.38) and delay discounting (beta = -0.11) independently track mothers’ relational reports.

• Why it matters: Evidence on how maternal mental illness relates to the mother-child relationship is often limited to the first postpartum year and narrow mood self-reports, leaving broader symptom dimensions and decision-making links unclear.
• What they did: The study measured twelve psychological constructs and tested their associations with mothers’ relational reports using regression with false discovery rate correction, plus a person-centered latent profile analysis.
• The result: After correction, only three constructs remained independently associated—cross-domain symptom burden, delay discounting, and orienting sensitivity—suggesting relational reports align more with breadth of symptoms than with specific perinatal mood domains.

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