1-171 - Parental Emotional Functioning and Children’s Affective Neurobiology

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

The emotional aspects of the caregiving environment are central to children’s development of emotional competence (Bariola et al., 2011). Evidence finds that emotion-related factors—including parents’ own emotional functioning, parent-child emotional asynchrony, emotional quality of parent-child interactions, and parent psychopathology—are linked to compromised emotion-related behavioral and psychophysiological regulation in children and adolescents (e.g., Calkins et al., 2008; Goodman, 2011; Woltering et al., 2015). Despite this important work, more research is necessary to elucidate potential neurobiological mechanisms linking emotional features of the caregiving environment to child emotional development. This understanding is necessary for informing directions for future research and family-focused preventions.

This symposium brings together innovative papers from three institutions examining associations between parent emotional functioning and child emotion-related neurobiological functioning using a variety of biopsychosocial methodologies, including parent fMRI, child fMRI, peripheral psychophysiology, and daily diary. Paper 1 uses fMRI to examine links between parents’ own reported negative emotion and emotion regulation as these are associated with adolescents’ emotion-related brain function. Paper 2 examines how similarity in parent and adolescent brain function during resting state fMRI scans are related to adolescents’ emotional competence and mediated by day-to-day parent-adolescent emotional synchrony. Paper 3 examines the role of parental depression, which is characterized by altered emotional functioning, in children’s peripheral physiological reactivity (pupil dilation) to an emotional stimuli and subsequent interpersonal stress. Our discussant, a nationally recognized expert on parenting and parent-child neurobiology, will discuss findings and directions for future research.

Sub Unit

• Biology and Neuroscience

Chair

• Caitlin Turpyn, George Mason University

Discussant

• Tara M Chaplin, George Mason University

Individual Presentations

• Associations between Parent Emotional Arousal and Regulation and Adolescent Affective Brain Response - Presenting Author: Caitlin Turpyn, George Mason University; Jennifer Poon, George Mason University; Corynne Ross, George Mason University; James Thompson, George Mason University; Tara M Chaplin, George Mason University

• Neural Concordance of Resting-State Intrinsic Neural Networks in Parent-Child Dyads - Presenting Author: Tae-Ho Lee, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Michelle Miernicki, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Eva Telzer, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

• Heightened Pupil Reactivity to Angry Faces Predicts Interpersonal Stress Generation in Children of Depressed Mothers - Presenting Author: Cope Feurer, Binghamton University (SUNY); Katie Burkhouse, University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of Psychiatry; Greg Siegle, University of Pittsburgh Psychology and Psychiatry; Brandon Gibb, Binghamton University (SUNY)