News Article

Sep 1, 2011—A new University of Haifa study reveals that a young person's experiences - both positive and negative - can influence his/her children later on in life.

The following excerpt is taken from an August 28, 2011 article in The Jerusalem Post.  The full article can be found here.

Adversity and enrichment at a young age can influence the next generation, according to psychologists at the University of Haifa.

Prof. Micah Leshem headed the team along with Prof. Jay Schulkin of Georgetown University and postgraduate students Hiba Zaidan and Neta Kvetniy- Ferdman.  They published their findings recently in the journal Developmental Psychobiology.

The lab study found that stress experienced by young female rats can impair their future offspring, but can also improve resilience. It also found that providing the young stressed females with an enriched environment (often used to model therapy), can indeed relieve some of the effects.

“The similarities between rats and humans raise the question of whether similar effects might transpire in humans; for example, exposure to war or natural disasters might have heritable effects,” explained Leshem.

Rats exposed to stress during early development inherit the effects of that stress to their offspring, largely expressed in behavior impairments but also characteristics of resilience. Providing environmental enrichment to the future mother rats had a remedial role on some of the negative effects. The team set out to examine the cross-generational effects of early exposure to stress and enrichment.

According to the researchers, their study “suggests that evolution equipped the parent generation to sample its environment, and then, possibly via heritable epigenetic changes, to prepare the next generation to better cope with this environment,” Leshem explained.