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Studying Neural Mechanisms of Parenting Influence on Adolescent Emotion Regulation With an fMRI Dyadic Interaction

Fri, March 22, 3:00 to 4:30pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 3, Room 320

Integrative Statement

Studies have demonstrated the influence of parenting on children’s development of emotion regulation, but little is known about the underlying neurobiology of this interaction. In the current study, adolescent participants and their parents underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning simultaneously. Individual participants were excluded for excessive motion, significant neurological findings, signal artifact, and/or a high number of missed trials on the task, resulting in a final sample size of 27 adolescents (15 female) and 25 parents (23 female). While in the scanners, participants completed a task where they were presented with a pattern of arrows twice and then asked to enter the pattern from memory. Participants started with $50 collectively and were told that both they and their partner had to enter the correct response or they would lose $5 for that trial. Participants were told this was a cooperative game they were playing with their partner, but in reality it was pre-programmed so that occasionally participants were shown feedback that their partner gave the incorrect response.

We hypothesized that parenting practices would be related to parents’ brain activation in response to their adolescent’s costly error, and that parents’ level of emotion regulation would be related to their adolescent’s brain response to their parent’s costly error. Parents completed the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS; Gratz & Roemer, 2004), and adolescents completed the Alabama Parenting Questionnaire (APQ; Frick, 1991). The AFNI program 3dTcorr1D was utilized to calculate Spearman correlations between 1) parents’ DERS scores and adolescents’ brain response to their parent’s costly error, and 2) adolescents’ ratings of their parent’s positive parenting techniques and the parents’ brain response to their adolescent’s costly error. Corrections for multiple comparisons were made at the p<.05 level for regions-of-interest implicated in emotional reactivity and regulation.

A significant relationship was found between adolescent dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) activation and their parents’ DERS scores, such that adolescents whose parents reported greater difficulty regulating their emotions had less dlPFC activation in response to their parents’ costly error (Figure 1). In parents, activation in three brain regions – bilateral ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), left insula/inferior frontal gyrus, and right posterior insula – was positively correlated with their adolescents’ report of positive parenting practices (Figure 2).

These results indicate that parents’ own emotion regulation abilities impact how their adolescents’ brains respond to an emotional event. Adolescents whose parents reported experiencing emotional dysregulation had less activation in the dlPFC, an area implicated in the regulation of emotions. Positive parenting practices were also found to be related to how the parents’ brains responded to their adolescent’s mistake. The vmPFC and inferior frontal gyrus are both brain regions implicated in emotion regulation, and the posterior insula is related to an empathic response. Thus, positive parenting practices likely involve the regulation of emotions and feelings of empathy when a child errs. These novel findings reflect the inter-individual nature of emotion regulation and provide important insights into how parenting influences children’s emotional development.

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