Prenatal exposure to maternal depression is related to the functional connectivity organization underlying emotion perception in 8-10-month-old infants – Preliminary findings

•We tested association between prenatal mood and infants’ response to emotions.•Network organization for viewing emotional faces interacted with prenatal mood.•This may have implications for social-emotional development. Emotion perception is critical for infant’s social development. Mother’s mood during pregnancy has been associated with infants’ emotional developmental risks. Graphtheory analysis was applied on EEG data recorded from 35, 8-to-10-month-old-infants prenatally exposed to high or low depressed symptoms, while viewing happy and sad faces. We found an interaction between group and emotion such that infants exposed to high-depressed-symptoms showed higher modularity – reflecting reduced perceptual-dynamics - for viewing happy emotions compared to sad. The opposite was observed for infants exposed to low-depressive-symptoms. These preliminary findings suggest that prenatal depressive mood may shape early functional organization for viewing emotional faces.