Caregiving, Neuro-emotional Functioning, and Psychopathology in Adolescence

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

During development, behaviors that are linked to psychopathologies, including fear, risk taking, and reward, are scaffolded through caregiving. At this point, however, we do not fully understand the neuro-emotional functions that mediate the associations between caregiving and psychopathology. The primary goal of this symposium is to address this gap. The first two presentations use within-subject experimental designs to elucidate parental effects on fear learning and risk sensitivity. The first talk shows that parental presence attenuates medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) activation to an aversive stimulus during fear conditioning in 6-17-year-old youth, indicating a possible parental buffering effect on fear learning. The second talk shows that neural sensitivity to risk, as manifested in striatum-vmPFC connectivity and activation in interoception-supporting brain regions while making risky decisions, develops differently from 6th to 9th grade depending on whether the risk involves parents or peers, thus underscoring the differential role of parents in the development of risk sensitivity. The third presentation uses a longitudinal design to examine how associations of parenting with neural reward functions predict risk for subsequent psychopathology. Specifically, it shows that perceived maternal criticism during childhood predicts a reduction from childhood to adolescence in nucleus accumbens activation during reward learning, which, in turn, predicts later internalizing and externalizing behaviors. Together, these studies provide new insights about how caregiving may shape neuro-emotional functioning linked to risk for psychopathology along development. The final discussion will focus on the possible domain-general mechanisms by which parents affect all these neuro-emotional functions.

Sub Unit

• Biological Processes: Neuroscience and Genetics

Chair

• Lior Abramson, Columbia University

Discussant

• Lior Abramson, Columbia University

Individual Presentations

• The Effect of Parental Presence on Frontolimbic Activation During Aversive Fear Conditioning - Presenting Author: Lior Abramson, Columbia University; Bridget Callaghan, The University of California, Los Angeles; Jennifer Silvers, University of California - Los Angeles; Tricia Choy, University of California - Riverside; Michelle Vantieghem; Anna Vannucci, Columbia University; Andrea Fields, Columbia University; Nim Tottenham, Columbia University

• Behavioral and Neural Trajectories of Risk Taking for Peer and Parent in Adolescence - Presenting Author: Seh-Joo Kwon, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Jessica S. Flannery, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Caitlin Turpyn, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Mitchell J Prinstein, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Kristen A Lindquist, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Eva H Telzer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Decreasing Nucleus Accumbens Activity During Adolescence Mediates the Relation Between Perceived Maternal Criticism in Childhood and Symptoms of Psychopathology in Late Adolescence - Lauren Rebekah Borchers, Stanford University; Presenting Author: Jessica Louise Buthmann, Stanford University; Josiah Leong; Ian H Gotlib, Stanford University