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Attention Ladies: Do you suffer from anxiety disorder or have been known to partake in dysfunctional social behavior? You may be able to blame your Dad.

A new study published online in Biological Psychiatry suggests that stress caused by chronic social instability during youth contributes to epigenetic changes in sperm cells that can lead to psychiatric disorders in female offspring.

Researchers at Tufts University conducted a study on adolescent male mice in which the mice were exposed to environmental stressors and were then made to procreate.

Lorena Saavedra-Rodríguez, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow in the Larry Feig laboratory at Tufts University School of Medicine explains her findings.

"The long-term effects of stress can be pernicious. We first found that adolescent mice exposed to chronic social instability, where the cage composition of mice is constantly changing, exhibited anxious behavior and poor social interactions through adulthood. These changes were especially prominent in female mice,"

Perhaps most interesting was that even though the stressed males did not express any of these altered behaviors, "they passed on these behaviors to their female offspring after being mated to non-stressed females; moreover, the male offspring passed on these behaviors to yet another generation of female offspring," as reported by Tufts University.

Because humans are so genetically similar to mice, researchers are confident that further studies will uncover similar phenomena in humans.