Certain parenting strategies can combat the negative impacts of maternal depression on an infant, suggests the first study of its kind. The work sought to investigate how a depressed mother's neuroendocrine response to stress can program the infant's hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, a set of signals and relationships between the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland and the adrenals. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is responsible for creating cortisol, a hormone released in response to stress.