Project 467237

The Fort McMurray wildfire began in May 2016, destroying homes and forcing its inhabitants to flee the city, including pregnant women. Prenatal stress due to past natural disasters has been associated with negative outcomes in infants and children, including social-emotional competence (Lequertier et al., 2019). As higher levels of social support and resilience, as well as expressive writing, has been shown to lower anxiety in perinatal women, these factors may intern positively affect fetal development, and consequently future socio-emotional development in children.The goal of the present study is to understand how psychosocial factors, including social support, resilience, and an expressive writing intervention, could buffer the effects of subjective prenatal maternal distress from the Fort McMurray wildfire on social emotional development in 5-6 year-old children. We predict that the association between higher prenatal subjective distress and worse social emotional development at 5-6 years-old will be stronger (1) the lower the womens prenatal social support, and (2) the lower the womans self-reported resilience. In addition, we hypothesize that this association will only be significant for women who were not in the expressive writing condition.This study will be using data collected as part of the ;Fort McMurray Mommy Baby Study, in addition to a new questionnaire which will be administered to measure the childrens present social emotional development. The participants' resilience, social support, and prenatal subjective distress due to the wildfire has already been previously assessed, and the expressive writing intervention has already been administered. If our hypotheses are supported, then our results will have implications for future interventions.