Drops of seawater contain traces of an ancient world

New research links chemical changes in seawater to volcanic activity, climate

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: MEBRAHTU WELDEGHEBRIEL WAS THE LEAD AUTHOR OF THE PAPER RECENTLY PUBLISHED IN THE JOURNAL SCIENCE ADVANCES. view more 

CREDIT: BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY, STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. -- Sea salt hides a secret: tiny droplets of the seawater from which it came, preserving geologic history.

Using specializing equipment obtained from National Science Foundation grant funds, Mebrahtu Weldeghebriel, PhD ’22, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, and Binghamton University Distinguished Professor of Earth Sciences Tim Lowenstein were able to reconstruct changes in seawater chemistry over the last 150 million years, also gaining insight into related geological processes and climate changes. Their article, “Seafloor Hydrothermal Systems Control Long-Term Changes in Seawater [Li+]: Evidence from Fluid Inclusions,” was recently published in the journal Science Advances.

The ocean “is like a giant soup of different elements,” Lowenstein explained. “Sodium and chloride are the most common ones, but there are dozens of others dissolved in seawater in trace amounts such as lithium.”

They looked at sea salt (halite) formed at various times over the past 150 million years in geographically diverse sedimentary basins in the United States, Europe, Asia and Africa. Within the salt samples were tiny pockets containing a bit of ancient seawater.

To access the tiny droplets, the researchers used a laser to drill holes into the salt crystals and then a mass spectrometer to analyze the different trace elements present. In this research, they focused specifically on the concentration of lithium, a trace element that sustained a seven-fold decrease over the past 150 million years, paralleled by a rise in magnesium to calcium ratios.

But why?

The cause for the long-term variations in seawater composition has been debated for the past two decades. The researchers proposed that the decline in lithium concentration in seawater is mainly associated with reduced production of oceanic crust and decreased seafloor hydrothermal activity, both of which are influenced by the movements of tectonic plates. The slowdown in plate activity over the past 150 million years led to less lithium being added to the ocean and reduced amounts of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, which ultimately led to global cooling and the present ice age. Turning back the clock 150 million years, the earth was a warmer place with more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and more lithium in the sea.

AS ABOVE, SO BELOW

“There is a close link between ocean chemistry and atmospheric chemistry,” Weldeghebriel said. “Whatever changes happen in the ocean also reflect what’s happening in the atmosphere.”

Overall, Weldeghebriel and Lowenstein’s research has made a significant advance in understanding the chemistry of Earth’s ancient oceans and how the movement of tectonic plates has influenced the composition of our Earth’s hydrosphere and atmosphere. Such chemical changes impact biology, as well, such as the marine creatures that build their shells out of calcium carbonate.

“The oceans and atmosphere are connected to one another, and how they change is related,” Lowenstein explained. “Everything is connected.”

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JOURNAL

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.adf1605 

ARTICLE TITLE

Seafloor Hydrothermal Systems Control Long-Term changes in Seawater [Li+]: Evidence from Fluid Inclusions

 

Creating pollen-free trees to combat hay fever

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PNAS NEXUS

Pollinosis, or hay fever, makes people miserable around the world, and Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria japonica) pollen is a significant cause of the suffering in the 38.8% of Japanese people who are allergic. Japanese cedar is also the country's most important timber species. A single mature tree produces on the order of three hundred million grains of pollen. Saneyoshi Ueno and colleagues investigated the genes required to produce this massive amount of genetic material. Previous research by Ueno’s team identified a gene, CJt020762, that seems to be required for pollen production. Mutants who carry broken versions of the gene make no pollen at all. Now, another gene, CjTKPR1, found in a different locus, is also determined to be necessary for the production of pollen. Functionally, CjTKPR1 is required for construction of the wall of the pollen grain. Mutant trees with nonfunctional versions of this gene already exist and produce nearly no pollen. Knocking out this gene in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, rice, tobacco, and daisies led to male sterility in each case. According to the authors, creating pollen-free commercially grown timber tree lines would be straightforward and desirable.

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JOURNAL

PNAS Nexus

DOI

10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad236 

ARTICLE TITLE

A single-nucleotide substitution of CjTKPR1 determines pollen production in the gymnosperm plant Cryptomeria japonica

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

8-Aug-2023

 

Overlooked CO2 emissions induced by air pollution control devices in China's coal-fired power plants

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CHINESE SOCIETY FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES

 

IMAGE: GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT. view more 

CREDIT: ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND ECOTECHNOLOGY

To combat this issue, China has implemented various environmental regulations, including the widespread use of air pollution control devices (APCDs) in CFPPs. While APCDs have successfully reduced air pollutants, their electricity consumption has led to indirect carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The extent of these CO2 emissions has remained uncertain, prompting researchers to delve deeper into this overlooked environmental concern.

In a new study published in Volume 17 of the journal Environmental Science and Ecotechnology, researchers from Shandong University conducted a study revealing that the proportion of APCD CO2 emissions in total emissions from CFPPs surged from 0.12% in 2000 to 1.19% in 2020. Notably, desulfurization devices were the primary contributors, accounting for approximately 80% of APCD CO2 emissions in 2020, followed by dust removal and denitration devices. The researchers also projected future APCD CO2 emissions under different scenarios, highlighting the significant impact of CFPPs' lifespan on emissions. They identified Nei Mongol, Shanxi, and Shandong provinces as potential hotspots for high emissions due to large-scale newly built CFPPs. To tackle this emerging environmental issue, the researchers proposed various measures, including enhancing APCD energy efficiency and providing low-carbon electricity through photovoltaic power or biomass co-firing with coal. They emphasized the need for comprehensive environmental impact assessments to ensure that policies aimed at reducing air pollutants do not inadvertently increase CO2 emissions. Furthermore, the study's analysis framework offers valuable insights for other emission-intensive sectors, such as steel production and waste incineration.

Highlights

• CO2 emissions induced by air pollution control devices are quantified.
• A plant-level CO2 emission inventory is compiled.
• Future emissions under diverse climate targets are simulated.
• Hotspots of future emissions are identified.

The study's findings have emphasized the importance of adopting integrated strategies to balance the reduction of both air pollutants and carbon emissions. The findings are expected to inform policymakers, industry stakeholders, and environmentalists alike, paving the way for more informed and holistic approaches to addressing China's environmental challenges.

###

References

Funding information

The National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFC3105304),

The National Natural Science Foundation of China (72348001),

The National Social Science Fund of China (22&ZD108).

DOI

10.1016/j.ese.2023.100295

About Environmental Science and Ecotechnology

Environmental Science and Ecotechnology (ISSN 2666-4984) is an international, peer-reviewed, and open-access journal published by Elsevier. The journal publishes significant views and research across the full spectrum of ecology and environmental sciences, such as climate change, sustainability, biodiversity conservation, environment & health, green catalysis/processing for pollution control, and AI-driven environmental engineering. The latest impact factor of ESE is 12.6, according to the Journal Citation ReportTM 2022.

National APCD CO2 emissions 2000–2020 (a), their proportions to the total emissions from CFPPs (b), and emissions categorized by APCD type (c) and capacity size (d). (The error bars in panel a represent the 95% confidence interval.)

CREDIT

Environmental Science and Ecotechnology

JOURNAL

Environmental Science and Ecotechnology

DOI

10.1016/j.ese.2023.100295 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Overlooked CO2 emissions induced by air pollution control devices in coal-fired power plants

 

Physicists open new path to an exotic form of superconductivity

Physical Review Letters published the new theoretical framework

Peer-Reviewed Publication

EMORY UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: LUIZ SANTOS, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS AT EMORY UNIVERSITY, IS SENIOR AUTHOR OF THE STUDY. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO BY EMORY UNIVERSITY

Physicists have identified a mechanism for the formation of oscillating superconductivity known as pair-density waves. Physical Review Letters published the discovery, which provides new insight into an unconventional, high-temperature superconductive state seen in certain materials, including high-temperature superconductors.

“We discovered that structures known as Van Hove singularities can produce modulating, oscillating states of superconductivity,” says Luiz Santos, assistant professor of physics at Emory University and senior author of the study. “Our work provides a new theoretical framework for understanding the emergence of this behavior, a phenomenon that is not well understood.”

First author of the study is Pedro Castro, an Emory physics graduate student. Co-authors include Daniel Shaffer, a postdoctoral fellow in the Santos group, and Yi-Ming Wu from Stanford University.

The work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences.

Santos is a theorist who specializes in condensed matter physics. He studies the interactions of quantum materials — tiny things such as atoms, photons and electrons — that don’t behave according to the laws of classical physics.

Superconductivity, or the ability of certain materials to conduct electricity without energy loss when cooled to a super-low temperature, is one example of intriguing quantum behavior. The phenomenon was discovered in 1911 when Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes showed that mercury lost its electrical resistance when cooled to 4 Kelvin or minus 371 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s about the temperature of Uranus, the coldest planet in the solar system.

It took scientists until 1957 to come up with an explanation for how and why superconductivity occurs. At normal temperatures, electrons roam more or less independently. They bump into other particles, causing them to shift speed and direction and dissipate energy. At low temperatures, however, electrons can organize into a new state of matter.

“They form pairs that are bound together into a collective state that behaves like a single entity,” Santos explains. “You can think of them like soldiers in an army. If they are moving in isolation they are easier to deflect. But when they are marching together in lockstep it’s much harder to destabilize them. This collective state carries current in a robust way.”

Superconductivity holds huge potential. In theory, it could allow for electric current to move through wires without heating them up, or losing energy. These wires could then carry far more electricity, far more efficiently.

“One of the holy grails of physics is room-temperature superconductivity that is practical enough for everyday-living applications,” Santos says. “That breakthrough could change the shape of civilization.”

Many physicists and engineers are working on this frontline to revolutionize how electricity gets transferred.

Meanwhile, superconductivity has already found applications. Superconducting coils power electromagnets used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines for medical diagnostics. A handful of magnetic levitation trains are now operating in the world, built on superconducting magnets that are 10 times stronger than ordinary electromagnets. The magnets repel each other when the matching poles face each other, generating a magnetic field capable of levitating and propelling a train.

The Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator that scientists are using to research the fundamental structure of the universe, is another example of technology that runs through superconductivity.

Superconductivity continues to be discovered in more materials, including many that are superconductive at higher temperatures.

One focus of Santos’ research is how interactions between electrons can lead to forms of superconductivity that cannot be explained by the 1957 description of superconductivity. An example of this so-called exotic phenomenon is oscillating superconductivity, when the paired electrons dance in waves, changing amplitude.

In an unrelated project, Santos asked Castro to investigate specific properties of Van Hove singularities, structures where many electronic states become close in energy. Castro’s project revealed that the singularities appeared to have the right kind of physics to seed oscillating superconductivity.

That sparked Santos and his collaborators to delve deeper. They uncovered a mechanism that would allow these dancing-wave states of superconductivity to arise from Van Hove singularities.

“As theoretical physicists, we want to be able to predict and classify behavior to understand how nature works,” Santos says. “Then we can start to ask questions with technological relevance.”

Some high-temperature superconductors — which function at temperatures about three times as cold as a household freezer — have this dancing-wave behavior. The discovery of how this behavior can emerge from Van Hove singularities provides a foundation for experimentalists to explore the realm of possibilities it presents.

“I doubt that Kamerlingh Onnes was thinking about levitation or particle accelerators when he discovered superconductivity,” Santos says. “But everything we learn about the world has potential applications.”

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JOURNAL

Physical Review Letters

DOI

10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.026601 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Emergence of the Chern Supermetal and Pair-Density Wave through Higher-Order Van Hove Singularities in the Haldane-Hubbard Model

 

The “unknome”: a database of human genes we know almost nothing about

Sharpening the focus on unknown proteins to accelerate research

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

Researchers from the United Kingdom hope that a new, publicly available database they have created will shrink, not grow, over time. That’s because it is a compendium of the thousands of understudied proteins encoded by genes in the human genome, whose existence is known but whose functions are mostly not. The database, dubbed the “unknome”, is the work of Matthew Freeman of the Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford, England, and Sean Munro of MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, and colleagues, and is described in the open access journal PLOS Biology. Their own investigations of a subset of proteins in the database reveal that a majority contribute to important cellular functions, including development and resilience to stress.

The sequencing of the human genome has made it clear that it encodes thousands of likely protein sequences whose identities and functions are still unknown. There are multiple reasons for this, including the tendency to focus scarce research dollars on already-known targets, and the lack of tools, including antibodies, to interrogate cells about the function of these proteins. But the risks of ignoring these proteins are significant, the authors argue, since it is likely that some, perhaps many, play important roles in critical cell processes, and may both provide insight and targets for therapeutic intervention.

To promote more rapid exploration of such proteins, the authors created the unknome database (www.unknome.org), that assigns to every protein a “knownness” score, reflecting the information in the scientific literature about function, conservation across species, subcellular compartmentalization, and other elements. Based on this system, there are many thousands of proteins whose knownness is near-zero. Proteins from model organisms are included, along with those from the human genome. The database is open to all and is customizable, allowing the user to provide their own weights to different elements, thereby generating their own set of knownness scores to prioritize their own research.

To test the utility of the database, the authors chose 260 genes in humans for which there were comparable genes in flies, and which had knownness scores of 1 or less in both species, indicating that almost nothing was known about them. For many of them, a complete knockout of the gene was incompatible with life in the fly; partial knockdowns or tissue-specific knockdowns led to the discovery that a large fraction contributed to essential functions influencing fertility, development, tissue growth, protein quality control, or stress resistance.

The results suggest that, despite decades of detailed study, there are thousands of fly genes that remain to be understood at even the most basic level, and the same is clearly true for the human genome. “These uncharacterized genes have not deserved their neglect,” Munro said. “Our database provides a powerful, versatile and efficient platform to identify and select important genes of unknown function for analysis, thereby accelerating the closure of the gap in biological knowledge that the unknome represents.”

Munro adds, “The role of thousands of human proteins remains unclear and yet research tends to focus on those that are already well understood. To help address this we created an Unknome database that ranks proteins based on how little is known about them, and then performed functional screens on a selection of these mystery proteins to demonstrate how ignorance can drive biological discovery.”

#####

In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002222

Citation: Rocha JJ, Jayaram SA, Stevens TJ, Muschalik N, Shah RD, Emran S, et al. (2023) Functional unknomics: Systematic screening of conserved genes of unknown function. PLoS Biol 21(8): e3002222. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002222

Author Countries: United Kingdom

Funding: This work was supported by the Medical Research Council, as part of United Kingdom Research and Innovation (MC_U105178783 to SM and MC_U105178780 to MF). RDS was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/R013381/1) and by the Alan Turing Institute through a Turing Fellowship (TU/B/00006). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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JOURNAL

PLoS Biology

DOI

10.1371/journal.pbio.3002222 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Cells

 

Good smells, bad smells: It’s all in the insect brain

Raman looks at natural and acquired preferences using locusts

Peer-Reviewed Publication

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS

 

IMAGE: BARANI RAMAN AND HIS LAB AT THE MCKELVEY SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING STUDIED THE BEHAVIOR OF LOCUSTS AND HOW THE NEURONS IN THEIR BRAINS RESPONDED TO APPEALING AND UNAPPEALING ODORS TO LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW THE BRAIN ENCODES FOR PREFERENCES AND HOW IT LEARNS. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO: RAMAN LAB, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS

Everyone has scents that naturally appeal to them, such as vanilla or coffee, and scents that don’t appeal. What makes some smells appealing and others not?

Barani Raman, a professor of biomedical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, and Rishabh Chandak, who earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in biomedical engineering in 2016, 2021 and 2022, respectively, studied the behavior of the locusts and how the neurons in their brains responded to appealing and unappealing odors to learn more about how the brain encodes for preferences and how it learns.

The study provides insights into how our ability to learn is constrained by what an organism finds appealing or unappealing, as well as the timing of the reward. Results of their research were published in Nature Communications Aug. 5.

Raman has used locusts for years to study the basic principles of the enigmatic sense of smell. While it is more of an aesthetic sense in humans, for insects, including locusts, the olfactory system is used to find food and mates and to sense predators. Neurons in their antennae convert chemical cues to electrical signals and relay them to the brain. This information is then processed by several neural circuits that convert these sensory signals to behavior.

Raman and Chandak set about to understand how neural signals are patterned to produce food-related behavior. Like dogs and humans salivating, locusts use sensory appendages close to their mouths called palps to grab food. The grabbing action is automatically triggered when some odorants are encountered. They termed odorants that triggered this innate behavior as appetitive. Those that did not produce this behavior were categorized as unappetitive.

Raman and Chandak, who earned the outstanding dissertation award from biomedical engineering, used 22 different odors to understand which odorants the locusts found appetitive and which they did not. Their favorite scents were those that smelled like grass (hexanol) and banana (isoamyl acetate), and their least favorites smelled like almond (benzaldehyde) and citrus (citral).

“We found that the locusts responded to some odors and not others, then we laid them out in a single behavioral dimension,” Raman said.

To understand what made some odorants more likable and others not, they exposed the hungry locusts to each of the scents for four seconds and measured their neural response. They found that the panel of odorants produced neural responses that nicely segregated depending on the behavior they generated. Both the neural responses during odor presentation and after its termination contained information regarding the behavioral prediction.

“There seemed to be a simple approach that we could use to predict what the behavior was going to be,” Raman said.

Interestingly, some of the locusts showed no response to any of the odors presented, so Raman and Chandak wanted to see if they could train them to respond. Very similar to how Pavlov trained his dog with a bell followed by a food reward, they presented each locust with an odorant and then gave them a snack of a piece of grass at different time points following the odor presentation. They found that locusts only associated appealing scents with a food reward. Delaying the reward, they found that locusts could be trained to delay their behavioral response.

“With the ON-training approach, we found that the locusts opened their palps immediately after the onset of the odor, stayed open during the presentation of the odor, then closed after the odor was stopped,” Raman said. “In contrast, the OFF-training approach resulted in the locusts opening their palps much slower, reaching the peak response after the odor was stopped.”

The researchers found that the timing of giving the reward during training was important. When they gave the reward four seconds after the odor ended, the locusts did not learn that the odor indicated they would get a reward. Even for the appealing scents no training was observed.

They found that training with unpleasant stimuli led locusts to respond more to the pleasant ones. To explain this paradoxical observation, Raman and Chandak developed a computational model based on the idea that there is a segregation of information relevant to behavior very early in the sensory input to the brain. This simple idea was sufficient to explain how innate and learned preference for odorants could be generated in the locust olfactory system.

“This all goes back to a philosophical question: How do we know what is positive and what is negative sensory experience?” Raman said. “All information received by our sensory apparatus, and their relevance to us, has to be represented by electrical activity in the brain. It appears that sorting information in this fashion happens as soon as the sensory signals enter the brain.”

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Chandak R, Raman B. Neural manifolds for odor-driven innate and acquired appetitive preferences. Nature Communications, Aug. 5, 2023., DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-40443-2.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (1453022, 1724218, 2021795) and the Office of Naval Research (N00014-19-1-2049, 955 N00014-21-1-2343).

Originally published by the McKelvey School of Engineering website.

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JOURNAL

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-023-40443-2. 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Neural manifolds for odor-driven innate and acquired appetitive preferences

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

8-Aug-2023

 

Cybersecurity project plans to connect researchers across the country

Grant and Award Announcement

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: DR. NARASIMHA REDDY view more 

CREDIT: TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

From building fighter jets to automobiles, the manufacturing world is increasingly adapting digital instruction as technology advances. Mechanical parts can be designed on a computer and shipped over the network to a manufacturing machine that follows digital instructions to produce a specific part. The move into the digital world makes securing online information a national interest. 

Dr. Narasimha Reddy, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, recently received a National Science Foundation grant to research cybersecurity issues in digital manufacturing.

“The hope is that by getting ahead of the deployment of these digital manufacturing machines and finding solutions for the cybersecurity problems, we will make manufacturing more secure,” he said. “Since these machines need to receive instructions over the network, they can potentially be sent malicious packets to damage the machines. We’re looking at these issues related to the security of the machines.”

When a company produces parts for fighter jets using modern manufacturing processes, there is a risk that someone could break into the network and compromise their integrity. A national security issue arises if defective machinery ends up in these jets.

“An easier way to think about this is with 3D-manufactured automobile parts,” Reddy said. “Let's say when you go to the car manufacturer or dealership, you need a part such as an axle. They don’t hold the parts anymore in inventory, so they print it for you. This may especially be the case for old cars that are not around anymore. If those designs are compromised, you could potentially get into an accident in a car with a defective part. The idea is to prevent these designs and parts to be compromised.”

Reddy aims to make manufacturers aware of potential issues so they can implement safety practices before deploying digital manufacturing machines. The idea is to get ahead of the problem before it becomes too commonplace. A website will also be built to open the lines of communication between manufacturers and researchers.

“This grant is about trying to get the people from the cybersecurity side and people from the manufacturing side to talk to each other to create a community that's going to be interested in solving the problems,” Reddy said. “Not only are we working together on research problems, but we're also trying to bring people of similar interests together through workshops, conferences and student design competitions. The intent is to create several activities that spark interest in this space.”

Working alongside Reddy for this project is Dr. Satish Bukkapatnam, co-principal investigator and Texas A&M industrial engineering professor. The team also includes Dr. Ramesh Karri and Dr. Nikhil Gupta from New York University, Dr. Nektarios Tsoutsos from the University of Delaware, Dr. Sidi Berri from The City University of New York and Dr. Annamalai Annamalai from Prairie View A&M.

By Katie Satterlee, Texas A&M Engineering

 

Mothers experiencing depression can still thrive as parents

UBC Okanagan researcher explores how external supports offset the risks to children’s health posed by maternal depression

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA OKANAGAN CAMPUS

The proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” takes on new significance when a mother of a child is experiencing depression.

“Being a mother with depression carries increased risks for a child’s physical and psychological health,” says Dr. Sarah Dow-Fleisner, Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work and Director of the Centre for the Study of Services to Children and Families at UBC Okanagan. “But it’s not fated to be, especially if mothers have external supports.”

Dr. Dow-Fleisner’s findings, recently published in the Journal of Family Issues, have important implications for how social workers and clinical practitioners—as well as families and communities—can help.

While a lot of research focuses on the postpartum period during which the rate of depression among mothers is highest, Dr. Dow-Fleisner wanted to focus on depression occurring later in childhood. Her team used data from a large longitudinal US study to compare depressed and non-depressed mothers of nine-year-old children.

Her analyses revealed that mothers with depression were more likely to report parenting stress and less likely to view themselves as competent parents as compared to non-depressed mothers. They also reported engaging in more disciplinary tactics, including nonviolent tactics like taking away privileges as well as aggressive tactics like cursing or threatening the child. In terms of involvement, they were less likely to be involved at the child’s school, such as attending an open house. However, they were equally likely to be involved in home activities, such as helping with homework.

“Furthermore, mothers with depression reported fewer interpersonal supports and community resources than mothers without depression,” says Dr. Dow-Fleisner. “This is consistent with previous research.”

Interpersonal supports refer to both emotional and material help from others, such as a relative providing advice or emergency childcare. Community resources refer to safety and neighbourhood cohesion. Neighbourhood cohesion measures the willingness of neighbours to help and the shared values of the neighbourhood, among other social and trust factors.

“Notably, those mothers with depression who reported higher levels of support and cohesion felt less stressed and more competent in their parenting,” says Dr. Dow-Fleisner. “These positive perceptions translated to less psychological aggression-based discipline and more home and school involvement with their children.”

These findings fit with a resilience perspective, whereby mothers facing adversity like depression can still thrive as parents—especially when these protective factors are present.

“We want to help moms both address their depression and improve the child’s health and wellbeing—this is known as a two-generation approach,” says Dr. Dow-Fleisner. “As mothers may not seek out help for their depression alone, a child health check-up in a primary care setting is a good opportunity to screen for maternal depression and provide support in identifying interpersonal supports and community resources.”

Dr. Dow-Fleisner adds that supportive programs should go beyond addressing immediate parenting problems and instead build capacity. For example, a community-based parenting support group could help a mother to build a network of people who could provide material and emotional support as needed. Dr. Dow-Fleisner cites Mamas for Mamas as one such community-based group. Mamas for Mamas, with branches in Kelowna and Vancouver, builds community and provides material as well as other supports for mothers and other caregivers.

“Further funding of programs that empower mothers—including those experiencing mental health concerns—would go a long way in improving the health and wellbeing of children, mothers and families,” says Dr. Dow-Fleisner.

 

 

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JOURNAL

Journal of Family Issues

DOI

10.1177/0192513X231181369 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Meta-analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Parenting While Depressed: The Influence of Interpersonal Supports and Community Resources for Mothers