Neural Activation to Maternal Praise Influences the Development of Depressive Symptoms in At-Risk Adolescents

• In Event: 1-193 - Antecedents and Consequences of Parental Praise

Integrative Statement

Background: Peer victimization in adolescence is associated longitudinally with symptoms of depression (Stapinski et al., 2015). Some research suggests that positive parenting behaviors, including parental praise and acceptance, buffer the negative effects of peer victimization to help prevent increases in depression (Bonnano & Hymel, 2010). However, not all youth benefit from positive parenting behaviors. One potential, yet unexplored, factor contributing to why parental acceptance appears to serve as a protective factor for some youth more than others may be individual differences in neurobiological sensitivity to positive parenting behaviors (Schriber & Guyer, 2016). Using an ecologically-valid fMRI task in which adolescents hear their mothers praise them, the current study sought to inform understanding of risk and protective factors for depression by examining how interactions between peer victimization, maternal acceptance, and neural activation to maternal praise influence the development of depression in adolescents at risk for depression due to a history of anxiety.

Methods: 38 youth (11-17 years; 20 females) with a history of treatment for an anxiety disorder completed the Parental Expressed Emotion fMRI task, in which they listened to audio clips of their mothers providing praise and talking about neutral events. Average BOLD activation during praise>neutral trials was extracted from several regions-of-interest (anatomically-defined), including the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex and bilateral nucleus accumbens, caudate, insula, and amygdala. Direct and interaction effects between self-reported peer victimization, parental acceptance, and neural activation at time 1 (T1) on depressive symptoms at time 2 (one year later) were tested using PROCESS (Hayes, 2018), controlling for T1 depressive symptoms, age and sex. Analyses were FDR-corrected to account for multiple comparisons.

Results: Activation in the left caudate interacted with peer victimization and maternal acceptance to predict increases in depression over one year (∆R2=.11, F(1,27)=10.18, p=.004). The interaction between maternal acceptance and peer victimization was significant at mean levels of left caudate activation (p=.019) and 1SD above the mean level of left caudate activation (p=.002), but not at 1SD below mean caudate activation. At the mean level and 1SD above the mean level of left caudate activation, only individuals who perceived the lowest level of maternal acceptance showed significant positive associations between peer victimization and increases in depression (ps=.001). Similar results were seen with the right caudate.

Discussion: Given the role of the caudate in learning and prediction error signaling (Delgado, 2007), youth with greater caudate activation to maternal praise may not have expected to hear praise during the task. These youths might also expect less praise in daily life and, based on current findings, appear most at-risk for depressive symptoms when they do perceive low maternal acceptance and greater peer victimization. However, these youths do not appear to develop depressive symptoms following peer victimization when they perceive moderate-high acceptance, suggesting that maternal acceptance may act as a protective factor. Further, interactions were not seen for youth with low caudate activation, suggesting that brain function is important to consider for understanding the influence of parental praise and acceptance on the relationship between peer victimization and depressive symptoms.

Authors

• Stefanie L Sequeira, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Rosalind D. Elliott, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Cecile D Ladouceur, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Erika Forbes, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jennifer Silk, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author