Poster #18 - Maternal Emotion Talk in Early Childhood Predicts Adolescents’ Neural Activity When Labeling Facial Emotion

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Biological Processes: Neuroscience and Genetics

Integrative Statement

Parental discussion of emotion is central to emotion socialization by increasing children’s awareness of emotion and facilitating development of emotion-related concepts (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998). More frequent and elaborative maternal talk about emotion, for instance, predicts young children’s understanding of other people’s emotions and socioemotional competence (e.g., Denham, Zoller, & Couchoud, 1994; Dunn, Brown, & Beardsall, 1991). Yet, contributions of early emotion talk to later child outcomes and the neural mechanisms involved are not well understood. In this vein, evidence points to three relevant regions. The amygdala processes the experience and recognition of emotions, and studies have highlighted its role in detecting emotional salience in the environment (e.g., Whalen et al., 2001). Further, neural studies reveal that the mentalizing regions – in particular, the STS and TPJ – are specifically involved in evaluation of other people’s emotions (see Lee & Siegle, 2012).
We examined frequency and quality of maternal emotion talk at 2.5 years as predictors of adolescents’ neural activity when labeling (versus passively viewing) angry and happy faces. We hypothesize that adolescents who experienced more frequent and elaborative maternal talk about emotion will show more activation in the amygdala, STS and TPJ regions. At 2.5 years, children (N = 128, 66 girls) and their mothers were observed while looking at pictures of infants’ emotion faces. Frequency (i.e., numbers of emotion terms used) and quality (i.e., degree to which mother explained versus labeled emotion) of maternal emotion talk were coded from transcripts. At 13 years, 52 children from the original study participated in an fMRI scan, in which neural activity to ambiguous emotion faces, generated by morphing angry or happy faces with neural faces, was assessed in two conditions. In the “label” condition, adolescents chose one of the three labels (“Happy”, “Neutral”, and “Angry”) displayed under the emotion face by pressing their index, middle, and ring fingers, respectively. In the “observing” condition, they were instructed to observe and press thumb for each emotion face. We contrasted the two conditions to obtain neural activation involved more in actively labeling emotion than in passively viewing emotion faces.
Path models indicated that more frequent and elaborative maternal emotion talk predicted greater activation of TPJ, STS and amygdala, when instructed to label (versus passively view) angry faces. These models controlled for child age, gender, language ability, and maternal education. Only one association emerged for happy faces: more elaborative talk predicted less amygdala activation when labeling versus viewing happy faces. These findings indicate that adolescents who experienced more frequent and elaborative emotion talk in early childhood may make more effort to understand other’s emotions and mental states.
We will extend these preliminary analyses to examine whether emotion talk also plays a role in emotion regulation. Given that affect labeling is an implicit emotion regulation strategy, which decreases amygdala activation and increases VLPFC activation (Lieberman et al., 2007). We expect that children who experience more frequent and elaborative emotion talk during toddlerhood will show more negative amygdala-VLPFC connectivity when labeling emotion faces.

Authors

• Xi Chen, University of Illinois
  Presenting Author

• Ethan M. McCormick, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
  Non-Presenting Author

• Nancy McElwain, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Non-Presenting Author

• Eva H. Telzer, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
  Non-Presenting Author