Poster #103 - Parents' Own Emotionality is Related to Their Infants' and Children's Neural Responses to Emotions

• In Event: Poster Session 18

Abstract

Children’s development of emotion perception is shaped by the interaction between environment and brain (Leppänen & Nelson, 2009; Eisenberg et al., 1998). Parents play a vital role in facilitating this process through mechanisms including hereditary traits, direct and indirect emotion-related parenting practices, and subtle but powerful immersion of family emotional climate created by parents’ own emotional characteristics—termed parental emotionality (Morris et al., 2007), all of which may act on children’s neural circuitry supporting their emotion perception. Most research investigating parental influences on children’s emotion processing has focused on parenting behaviors, but comparatively little work has examined the influence of parental emotionality (reactivity to emotional stimuli; Eisenberg et al., 2000). Indeed, despite its potential significance, the role of parental emotionality in shaping children’s emotion processing neural circuitry has not been empirically tested.
In two studies, we directly test the hypothesis that parental emotionality is related to how children’s developing brain specializes to support emotion processing. Specifically, we examine whether and how parental emotionality (assessed with parents’ self-reported Emotion Reactivity Scale; ERS, Nock et al., 2008) is related to children’s emotion-related brain activity in two age groups: preschool (where accurate emotion perception skills are essential for daily activities) and infancy (where brain is most easily shaped by experiences).
In the first study, 29 3- to 5-year-old children (19 girls, Mage = 4.4 years, SD = 0.59) had their brain activity (event-related potentials; ERP) recorded while they passively viewed faces expressing different emotional expressions (happy, fearful, angry, neutral) at full and reduced intensity (from the “NimStim” database). We examined relations between ERP difference waves (full minus reduced intensity emotions) for children’s N170 mean amplitude (an ERP component associated with face and emotion perception) and parental emotionality. Results revealed that children of parents who reported higher intensity emotionality show greater neural specialization for more intense angry expressions, while children of parents who reported lower intensity emotionality show greater neural specialization for less intense angry expressions (b = 4.56, p < 0.01), demonstrating relations between parental emotionality and children’s emotion processing neural circuitry (see Figure 1).
In the second study, to further explore when and how parental emotionality may influence the development of emotion processing neural circuitry, we are examining 4- to 5-month-old infants’ electroencephalogram (EEG) during a live naturalistic interaction with their mothers while they look through a booklet of four emotionally evocative pictures (a shark, a moldy apple, a caged dog, a frolicking puppy). Mothers sat across from their infant and were instructed to talk with their infant about each picture as they normally would (see Figure 2). Data collection is ongoing. Further analyses will be conducted and presented on a larger sample, but preliminary results demonstrate individual differences in infants’ brain activity during emotion-related interactions with caregivers based on caregivers’ self-reported ERS (ts < -3.1, ps < 0.05).
Taken together, these two studies shed important light on relations between parental emotionality and children’s emotion processing, and point to origins of individual differences in children’s developing emotion processing neural circuitry.

Authors

• Ruohan Xia, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author

• Zoe Pestana, University of California - Davis

• Serena K Mon, Northwestern University

• Tahli Ida Frenkel, Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Ziama Arkin Infancy Institute

• Lindsay Caroline Bowman, University of California - Davis