Regulating childhood anxiety: The role of parents in modulating frontoamygdala circuitry

• In Event: Novel perspectives on the neurodevelopment of emotion regulation

Abstract

Parents play a central role in regulating children’s emotions early in life and provide comfort during fearful situations. For children with anxiety disorders, parents often become deeply enmeshed in children’s symptoms through the process of family accommodation. In the present study we aimed to identify the neurobiological mechanisms through which parents regulate anxious children’s fear and tested whether parental modulation of frontoamygdala circuitry was associated with the extent to which children experienced family accommodation in daily life. Participants were 45 children ages 6-12 with a primary diagnosis of an anxiety disorder. To evaluate the influence of parental presence on child fear regulation, children completed two runs of a fearful faces task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): once alone and once in the presence of their parent. Results suggested reduced amygdala reactivity to fearful faces in parental presence compared to parental absence (p<.05). Moreover, children who experienced higher levels of family accommodation had greater ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activation (p<.05) and stronger inverse vmPFC-amygdala functional connectivity (p<.05) in parental presence versus parental absence. These observations provide a neurobiologically grounded framework for understanding how parents buffer their offspring’s distress early in life and how this process can go awry in pediatric anxiety disorders. More broadly, they set the stage for developing and refining interventions targeting maladaptive parent-child emotion regulation.

Authors

• Dylan Gee, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Sadie Zacharek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
  Non-Presenting Author

• Cristina Nardini, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Hannah Spencer, University of Amsterdam
  Non-Presenting Author

• Paola Odriozola, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alyssa Martino, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tess Anderson, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Grace Hommel, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Carla Eugenia Marin, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Wendy Silverman, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Eli R Lebowitz, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author