BackHome
Refresh: OffView Personal Schedule
Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

The Effect of Parental Presence on Frontolimbic Activation During Aversive Fear Conditioning

Sat, March 25, 11:45am to 1:15pm, Salt Palace Convention Center, Floor: 3, Meeting Room 355 C

Abstract

Introduction: Aversive learning is crucial for survival but could lead to psychopathology when it goes awry (Wise & Dolan, 2020), stressing the need to investigate contexts that affect it. During development, the parent is an imperative context that influences emotional learning (Callaghan et al., 2019). Specifically, rodent work (Moriceau & Sullivan, 2006) and behavioral work with preschool children (Tottenham et al., 2019) has shown that parents are an important buffer for this system. Here, we explored the neurobiology of parental fear buffering by investigating parental presence effects on children and adolescents’ neural response during a classical aversive fear conditioning task. Given the involvement of the amygdala-medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) circuitry in aversive learning and its susceptibility to parental cues (Gee et al., 2014), we hypothesized that amygdala and mPFC activation would differ according to whether youth learn about fearful stimuli with, or without, their parent.

Methods: Participants were 6-17-year-old youth (N=48, M=11.61, SD=2.84, 60% females; 19% Hispanic, 23% White, 19% Black, 8% Asian-American, 15% Mixed, 17% did not answer; final N after head motion exclusion=39) who completed an aversive learning task during fMRI. They watched two fractal shapes - one shape was followed by an aversive tone in 75% of the presentations (Conditioned Stimulus with Noise; CS+); the other shape was never followed by an aversive tone (Conditioned Stimulus without Noise; CS-). Before and after the learning phase, participants rated how much the shape made them nervous and how much they liked it. Participants completed the task twice, once with their parent touching their hand or leg and once alone (order counterbalanced).

Results: After the learning phase, participants reported feeling more nervous about the CS+ than the CS- (pre-learning: M=-.11, SE=.14; post-learning: M=.65, SE=.16, t=-3.75, p=.001). They also reported less liking of the CS+ when alone (pre-learning: M=.21, SE=.17; post-learning: M=-.33, SE=.21, t=-2.29, corrected p=.052) but not when being with the parent (pre-learning: M=-.15, SE=.17; post-learning: M=-.08, SE=.29, t=.225, p=.82), F=4.128, p=.048. Region-of-Interest analysis revealed that the parent condition (compared to alone) was associated with mPFC activation (parent: M=-.16, SE=.06; alone: M=.01, SE=.07; t=-2.06, p=.046, d =-.33) but not amygdala activation (parent: M=.04, SE=.04; alone: M=-.01, SE=.06; t=-0.57, p=.573). Specifically, during parental presence (relative to parental absence), the mPFC showed lower activation to the CS+ (relative to the CS-), indicating an attenuated response to the aversive conditioned stimulus.

Discussion: This study investigated parental presence effects on children and adolescents’ neural patterns during aversive learning. It found an attenuated mPFC activation during parental presence in response to a conditioned (relative to an unconditioned) stimulus. This finding is consistent with findings in adults showing lower prefrontal activation when a supportive person is present during fear conditioning (Johnson et al., 2013), suggesting parents may influence aversive learning by providing safety clues (Gee et al., 2014) and decreasing perceived risk demands (Coan & Sbarra, 2015). This study advances the understanding of parental effects on emotional learning and generates new hypotheses regarding prefrontal brain development and fear neurobiology in youth without available supportive parenting.

Authors