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Maternal emotional abuse history is related to neural activation when empathizing with their children’s emotions

Sat, March 23, 9:45 to 11:15am, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 3, Room 340

Integrative Statement

Research has suggested that mothers who have experienced traumatic events such as childhood maltreatment have significant difficulties with parenting (Carothers Bert et al., 2011; Hughes & Cossar, 2015; Muzik et al., 2017). Prior studies have largely examined these associations using self-report and observational measures of parenting. Despite increased interest in brain-behavior relationships, the literature on neural response during or after exposure to parenting stimuli is sparse, especially among caregivers known to be at risk due to psychopathology and/or histories of adversity. The few existing studies have, however, suggested atypical neural activity (both heightened and dampened) when viewing images of their children or hearing own versus other infant cries among at-risk mothers (Kim et al., 2010; Moser et al., 2013; Schechter et al., 2012; Wright et al., 2017). The present study examined associations between maternal experiences of childhood emotional abuse and neural responses during a novel functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) task designed to tap into maternal empathy regarding child emotions, a critical aspect of sensitive parenting. In this study, 14 low-income, trauma-exposed mothers (mean age 26 years), who were enrolled during pregnancy in an ongoing longitudinal study on psychosocial risks and parenting, participated in a follow-up lab visit when their children were 5 years old. These mothers underwent a Child Face Mirroring Task (CFMT) during fMRI scans. During the CFMT, mothers were shown pictures of their own and unknown children displaying four emotional expressions (neutral, ambiguous, distressful, and joyful), presented consecutively in a pseudo-random order (4 seconds each picture, 16 seconds per block, 4 blocks per task for each of the Own and Other Child). Mothers were instructed before each block to either “join” (i.e., empathize with and imitate the child’s emotions) or “observe” (i.e., observe as unresponsively as possible, trying not to generate any emotion). For this study, the Join > Observe Own Child differential responses during CFMT were regressed against severity of maternal childhood emotional abuse (based on the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire; Bernstein & Fink, 1998). The threshold for interpretable results was set at p = 0.005 uncorrected with at least 30 voxels in a cluster. Results revealed that participants with higher levels of childhood emotional abuse showed greater Join-Own-Child vs Observe-Own-Child differential responses in the left inferior parietal lobule (IPL), dorsal precuneus (dPrC), bilateral temporal poles (TP), dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), periaqueductal gray (PAG), and middle cingulate cortex (MCC). See Figure 1. These areas are typically involved in top-down target-oriented attention, autobiographical memory retrieval, and the pain/defensive systems. Results suggest that mothers, when prompted/required to empathize with their young children’s emotions, may attend to the child, but also attend to their own memories and psychic pain at a neurobiological level as a function of their own childhood emotional abuse experiences. These findings indicate there may be a neural basis for observed disturbances in parenting among maltreated mothers, particularly disturbances that are characterized by incoherent and contradictory parenting behaviors.

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