Child Empathic Concern Moderates Links Between Parent and Offspring Depression

• In Event: Parenting and Children's Empathy Across Age and Risk Context

Abstract

Introduction
Empathy is related to prosocial behavior (Eisenberg & Miller, 1987), but it is considered a “risky strength” as it can also increase risk for internalizing disorders (Tone & Tully, 2015). Children whose mothers have experienced recurrent depression express negative emotions more frequently; children’s over-concern in the face of this frequent distress relates to their own higher symptomatology (Zahn-Waxler & Radke-Yarrow, 1990). Parental depression (Pearson et al., 2013) and high levels of empathy (Zahn-Waxler & Van Hulle, 2011) both confer vulnerability to depression, yet the complex relations among these variables leading to child depression have yet to be investigated. This study examines whether child empathy moderates the link between parent and offspring depression. We predicted that children whose parents had a history of depression would themselves have higher depression, but this effect would be stronger for children with higher empathy.

Method
Participants (N = 1188) in the Wisconsin Twin Panel participated in a laboratory visit at age 7 which included an empathy paradigm in which a study confederate feigned an injury (i.e., pinching finger on a clipboard). Children’s responses were videotaped and coded across five empathy-related scales: interest and attention in the situation, hypothesis testing (i.e., trying to understand the situation), verbal and prosocial acts, positive valenced empathy (i.e., attempts to cheer up the confederate), and empathic concern (i.e., affective response). Temperament measures were also obtained.

Our outcome measure of child depression symptomatology was scored from mother-reported symptoms of depression in the MacArthur Health and Behavior Questionnaire (HBQ). In addition to children’s empathy-related responses, predictors included composites of maternal and paternal depression using factor scores of recurrent depression from the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) and the well-being scale from the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ) for each parent.

Results
In linear regressions with child’s empathic concern, child gender, maternal depression, and paternal depression as predictors and child depression as the outcome, both maternal and paternal depression predicted child depression (see Table 1). The highly significant main effect of maternal depression was qualified by a significant interaction with child’s empathic concern. More depressed mothers whose children showed empathic concern to an experimenter’s distress reported more depressive symptoms in their children (see Figure 1). Child gender showed no predictive effect. The role of other variables, including main effects of hypothesis-testing, are described in the presentation.

Discussion
Results indicate that children's over-concern for others' pain in the context of parent depression may confer higher child depression symptomatology. Though typically less studied, paternal depression uniquely influenced child depression over and above levels of maternal depression albeit with fewer complex interactions. Notably, unlike previous work (Van der Graaff et al., 2018), we did not find that child gender impacted patterns between parent and offspring depression. Future work with this data will investigate the potential feedback loop between empathic concern and child depression in the context of parental depression.

Authors

• Emily Hilton, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author

• Elizabeth M. Planalp, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Non-Presenting Author

• Carol Ann Van Hulle, University of Wisconsin, Madison
  Non-Presenting Author

• H Hill Goldsmith, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Non-Presenting Author

• Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Non-Presenting Author