Author: Luis Caseñas, Class of 2026

Figure 1: EEG cap and electrodes placed on the head of a participant; the blunt nature of these electrodes works better with hair types from a white population rather than black.

Maternal health refers to mothers’ physical and mental well-being during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum. In the study of maternal health, electroencephalography (EEG), which generates event-related potentials (ERPs), is used to image and further understand the maternal brain. Generated ERPs are traced to certain EEG stimuli, and allow for the analysis of the strength and timing of rapid neural responses. While of utmost importance for the health of both mother and child, maternal health becomes a subject of scrutiny when considering alarming racial disparities. Women of color are significantly more likely to experience negative health outcomes–including death and mental health conditions–than white women.

This racial disparity is not only seen in maternal health outcomes but in conducting maternal health research as well. In an examination of 18 EEG/ERP studies with over 750 mothers in total, Dr. Francesca Penner and colleagues at Yale’s Child Study Center found a significant difference in the number of White participants compared to non-White participants. With this data in mind, a simple question arises: how can one account for racial disparities in maternal health when its study suffers from racial disparity itself? Since most research in this area is on white mothers, a biased understanding of the maternal brain may be the outcome. There is danger in generalizing findings to the broader population because this could lead to inaccurate literature that others will build on. 

Alongside sampling bias, the authors highlighted systemic bias in the EEG process as a possible source of disparity. EEG equipment is composed, in part, of many blunt-ended electrodes that are placed into the EEG cap on a participant’s head. The blunt nature of these electrodes doesn’t pair well with coarse, twisted, and braided hair, often systemically excluding those of African descent from participating. 

Dr. Penner and colleagues believe that a call for racial equity in maternal health research must be made, and the results of this paper may be a means of doing so. Actions that researchers can take include increasing racial diversity within research teams, expanding recruitment sites to more diverse communities to account for sampling bias, and adopting more inclusive EEG equipment to not exclude certain demographics from participation. Only then may research on maternal health be more precise, and our knowledge on the subject be more equitable.

Work Cited:

[1] Penner, F., Wall, K. M., Guan, K. W., Huang, H. J., Richardson, L., Dunbar, A. S., Groh, A. M., & Rutherford, H. J. V. (2023). Racial disparities in EEG research and their implications for our understanding of the maternal brain. Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience, 23(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-022-01040-w
[2] Image retrieved from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EEG_Recording_Cap.jpg