The Role of Early Attachment and Parental Presence in Adolescent Behavioral and Neurobiological Regulation

• In Event: Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

Early attachment relationships often provide a context for young children to experience emotional security, which catalyzes exploration of the environment and development of emotion regulation skills. Furthermore, early attachment shapes brain development that underlies emotion regulation, and these linkages may be particularly salient during adolescence when sensitivity to affective cues is heightened. Thus, adolescents with secure and insecure attachment histories may vary in their responses to emotional stimuli at the level of behavior and the brain. In addition, parental buffering may protect youth from less optimal emotion-related responses, but these benefits may vary as a function of an adolescent’s early attachment security. As such, we hypothesized that adolescents who exhibited insecure compared with secure attachment in toddlerhood would show greater behavioral and neurobiological dysregulation when exposed to affective stimuli, and that parental presence would buffer emotion dysregulation for insecure adolescents.

This 10-year prospective longitudinal study included 51 parent-child dyads who completed a modified version of the Strange Situation to assess attachment security when children were approximately 2.5 years-old (15 female). Approximately 10 years later, as adolescents (Mage=13.2 years) they completed a social go-nogo task in the context of appetitive (e.g., adolescent peers hanging out) and aversive (e.g., peers rejecting adolescent) social scenes, as well as control trials depicting scrambled images, during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Youth completed this task alone and in the presence of their parent. Behavioral dysregulation in affective scenes was measured by false alarms in appetitive and aversive trials compared to control trials.

To test for attachment (secure versus insecure) and contextual (parent presence versus alone) differences in false alarms toward affective stimuli, we fitted one multi-level model for appetitive stimuli and one for aversive stimuli. As shown in Figure 1A, adolescents with early insecure (versus secure) attachment exhibited significantly more false alarms toward appetitive cues compared with control trials (B = -.12, SE = .01, p < .001). Further, an insecure (versus secure) attachment history was associated with hypoactivation in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ; Figure 1B) and posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), two regions associated with social cognition. For the aversive model, insecure (versus secure) adolescents made more false alarms toward aversive cues, but when their parent was present their performance improved, suggesting social buffering (Figure 2A; B = .19, SE = .06, p = .002). Insecure adolescents also showed hyperactivation in the TPJ (Figure 2B) and pSTS toward aversive cues compared to secure adolescents, and this dysregulation effect was also buffered by parental presence, aligning with previous work showing that mothers can redirect adolescents toward more efficient regulation.

Together, these findings suggest that adolescents with insecure attachment histories struggle with behavioral dysregulation in affective contexts, and that hypoactivation and hyperactivation of social cognition brain regions to appetitive and aversive stimuli, respectively, may underlie these difficulties. However, parental presence appears to buffer dysregulation in aversive contexts for adolescents with early insecure attachment, highlighting the importance of mother influence from early childhood into adolescence on offspring regulatory abilities.

Authors

• Christy Rae Rogers, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Xi Chen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  Non-Presenting Author

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

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