Early Parenting Intervention Effects on At-Risk Children’s Neural Reactivity to Faces During Middle Childhood

• In Event: Neurobiological Effects of Early Adversity: Intergenerational Transmission and Intervention

Abstract

Early life adversity is associated with atypical neurodevelopment and heightened reactivity to potential threat. However, early interventions that enhance parenting quality have been shown to improve the developmental trajectories associated with early adversity. Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC) is a well-characterized, evidence-based early parenting intervention that may permit researchers to investigate how children’s underlying neurobiology changes in response to early intervention delivered to their parents. ABC is delivered across 10 in-home sessions by trained parent coaches and has been shown to be efficacious in improving parent and child outcomes through multiple randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving several vulnerable populations, including children living with birth parents following involvement with Child Protective Services (CPS). Recently, a long-term RCT follow-up fMRI assessment revealed that ABC-related improvements in children’s behavioral problems were mediated by its enhancement of children’s brain reactivity to pictures of their mothers’ faces. However, it remains unclear whether the effects of ABC on children’s brain functioning are generalizable – that is, whether they extend to non-mother-related stimuli.
Thus, the present study aimed to test the causal impact of ABC on children’s neural processing of threatening faces. Families were originally recruited in a major Mid-Atlantic city as part of a randomized clinical trial when children were infants (1.7-21.4 months). As part of a city-wide initiative designed to redirect children from foster care, high-risk families were referred from CPS due to allegations of abuse or neglect. Upon recruitment, enrolled families were randomly assigned to receive either ABC or a control intervention. Participants (N = 60, Mage = 10.0 years) included 41 high-risk children (ABC: n = 21; control intervention: n = 20) who had participated in the RCT during infancy and completed an 8-year follow-up fMRI assessment, in addition to a comparison sample of low-risk children with no history of CPS involvement who also completed the fMRI assessment (n = 19). As part of the fMRI protocol, children completed an emotional face viewing task involving pictures of fearful and neutral faces.
Across both fearful and neutral faces, high-risk children exhibited greater occipital cortex and fusiform gyrus activation than low risk-children, suggesting greater orienting to potential threat. Additionally, children in the ABC group had greater face-related activation than children in the control intervention group in clusters of brain regions commonly associated with emotion regulation, including the right orbitofrontal cortex, right insula, and bilateral anterior cingulate cortex. There were no group differences in a fearful versus neutral contrast. However, in light of previous findings that maltreated children tend to perceive even neutral faces as more threatening than non-maltreated children, results suggest that early parenting intervention (in this case, ABC) may enhance at-risk children’s emotion regulation in the face of potential threat. Results of an exploratory analysis of functional connectivity during the emotional face task will also be discussed.

Authors

• Emilio Alejandro Valadez, University of Maryland - College Park
  Presenting Author

• Nim Tottenham, Columbia University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alexandra Tabachnick, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Daniel S. Pine, National Institutes of Health
  Non-Presenting Author

• Mary Dozier, University of Delaware
  Non-Presenting Author