Poster #10 - Children with Familial Risk for Depression Show Differential Neural Responses to Mothers' and Strangers' Voices

• In Event: Poster Session 14

Abstract

Voice perception plays a fundamental role in social communication. Neuroimaging evidence indicates that the right-lateralized neural activities in the temporal regions in response to speech are evident in early development. Furthermore, mothers’ speech evoked greater activation in temporal regions than unfamiliar speech among typically-developing children. Early exposure to maternal depression may lead to experience-dependent fine-tuning of neural systems underlying speech perception. To advance the understanding of neural mechanisms underlying parent-to-child transmission of depression, the present study utilized functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to examine whether offspring of depressed mothers exhibit differential neural responses to mothers’ and strangers’ emotional prosody.
Participants were 45 children (Mage=4.42, SD=0.31). Of these participants, 23 children had mothers who were characterized with Major Depressive Disorder during their children’s lifetime. The fNIRS system that outfitted with source-detector channels were arranged to capture hemodynamic changes in the bilateral temporal regions. Children listened to emotionally-varied prosody produced by their own mother and another participant’s mother.
A mixed-effects model revealed a significant Group-by-Speaker (mother versus stranger) effect at a channel corresponding to the right posterior temporal region (FDR corrected q<.05). Children of depressed mothers exhibited greater activation to the stranger’s voices than own mothers’ voices, relative to those with non-depressed mothers (Figure 1). The group difference was less pronounced for the mother’s voice.
The present study showed that early exposure to maternal depression is associated with greater response to voices from an unfamiliar female. Further investigation will be conducted to examine whether this atypical response to familiar versus unfamiliar emotional voices is related to increased internalizing symptoms in the at-risk children.

Authors

• Xiaoxue Fu, University of South Carolina
  Presenting Author

• Michele Morningstar, Queen’s University

• Whitney Ian Mattson

• Scout Crowell

• Xin Feng, The Ohio State University

• Eric Nelson, Nationwide Children's Hospital