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Neural Similarity as a Resilience Marker in the Pathway Linking Chaos, Parenting, and Substance Use

Fri, March 24, 9:30 to 10:15am, Salt Palace Convention Center, Floor: 1, Meeting Room 150 B-C

Abstract

Research suggests parent-child relationships are regulators that buffer the child from adverse effects of stressful experiences on behavioral health outcomes. To date, we do not know whether parent-child neural similarity—the level of similarity between parent-child functional brain activity representing the level of attunement within each dyad—plays a protective role against stressful environments. In the current study, we investigated the buffering role of parent-adolescent neural dyadic similarity against adverse environments by examining whether parent-adolescent resting-state network (RSN) connectome similarity moderates the detrimental effects of household chaos on adolescent health risk behaviors which operate directly as well as indirectly through parental monitoring.
As a subset of a larger longitudinal brain study, the resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data of 70 parent-adolescent dyads were analyzed (43% females for adolescents, 59 mothers, 11 fathers, adolescent Mage = 15 years). To estimate the dyadic neural similarity in functional connectivity between primary caregivers and their adolescent (see Figure 1), we used the multipattern connectivity similarity estimation. The connectivity pattern similarity was calculated by vectorizing each individual’s Fisher-Z transformed connectivity matrix and correlating between each pair of parent-adolescent dyads. Household Chaos (at Time 1) was assessed by adolescents’ reports on the Confusion, Hubbub, and Order Scale (Matheny et al., 1995). Parental monitoring (at Time 1) was assessed by adolescents’ reports on the Parental Monitoring Scale (Stattin & Kerr, 2000). To measure adolescent substance use (at Time 2, one year later), adolescent participants reported typical frequency of cigarette, alcohol, and marijuana using a substance use index (Wills et al., 2003).
the significant interaction effects between household chaos and neural similarity on adolescent substance use (p < .001) and on parental monitoring (p = .051) suggested that neural similarity moderated the direct path between household chaos and adolescent substance use as well as the first part of the indirect path between household chaos and parental monitoring (see Figure 2). For the direct path from household chaos to adolescent substance use, the effect was significant at lower levels of neural similarity (B = 0.31, SE = 0.09, p = .001), but not at higher levels of neural similarity (B = -0.27, SE = 0.18, p = .126). For the path from household chaos to parental monitoring, the effect was significant at lower levels of neural similarity (B = -0.41, SE = 0.13, p = .002), but not at higher levels of neural similarity (B = -0.01, SE = 0.16, p = .966). Finally, the indirect effect from household chaos to adolescent substance use via parental monitoring was significant at lower levels of neural similarity (95% CI [0.052; 0.407]), but not for higher levels of neural similarity (95% CI [-0.135; 0.160]).
Overall, higher household chaos at Time 1 predicted higher adolescent substance use at Time 2 directly and also indirectly via lower parental monitoring, but only among dyads with low parent-adolescent neural similarity. The data suggest that the expected detrimental effects of stressful environments on the development of health risk behaviors may be attenuated by resilience-promoting brain-to-brain similarity.

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