Associations between Mothers’ Emotional Recognition Skills and Ability to Recognize Child Depression

• In Event: Diverse Mechanisms in the Development of Internalized Distress and Self-Harm

Abstract

Childhood depression—both clinical and subthreshold levels—poses a significant public health problem (Mojtabai et al., 2016); yet, more than half of children meeting criteria for depression do not receive treatment or services (Merikangas et al., 2010). Although demographic variables, such as income and access to health insurance, have been identified as barriers to treatment, psychological variables also likely explain why so few children receive mental health services. In this study, we propose to examine mothers’ emotion recognition skills as a potential barrier to recognizing child depressive symptoms, controlling for mothers’ depressive symptoms. We hypothesize that mothers who make more emotion recognition errors, and specifically more errors related to sadness, will be less likely to identify child depression. Additionally, we plan to test the extent to which mothers’ emotion recognitions skills and ability to recognize symptoms of child depression are correlated with their attitudes toward seeking treatment. Data for this study are already collected, but have not been analyzed. We have high confidence that analyses will be completed well before the conference. Participants were 74 children and their mothers recruited from the community (7 father-child dyads excluded from analyses). Children’s M age was 13.74 years old (SD = 2.52) and 55.6% were female. Children were 44.4% White, 28.4% African American,19.8% Hispanic/Latinx, and 7.4% reported another or multiple races. Approximately 17% of children met criteria for a current or previous major depressive episode, based on a K-SADS diagnostic interview. On average, mothers were 42.42 years old (SD = 7.14) and were 51.3% White, 29.7% African American, 17.6% Hispanic/Latinx, and 1.4% Native American. Mothers completed the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Behavior 2 (DANVA2; Nowicki & Mitchell, 1998), a computerized emotion recognition task using visual and auditory stimuli. The Faces task includes 24 racially-diverse pictures of children’s faces and the Paralanguage task includes 24 audio-clips of a child saying, “I’m going out of the room now, but I’ll be back.” After each stimuli, mothers selected from one of four emotions: happy, angry, sad, fearful. The DANVA2 provides a total error score and the proportion of errors made for each emotion. Mothers completed a modified version of the Friend in Need Questionnaire (Burns & Rapee, 2006), which included eight vignettes about an adolescent experiencing depression, an externalizing disorder, or a normative life stressor (e.g., break-up). Mothers were asked how worried they would be if the child in the vignette was their own child, rated on a 4-point Likert scale from not at all to extremely worried. They were also asked to identify what might be the matter with the child; answers were coded for whether parents could correctly identify which children in the vignettes were depressed. Mothers also completed the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (Radloff, 1977) and Paternal Attitudes Toward Psychological Services Inventory (Turner, 2012). The analysis plan will be pre-registered on the Open Science Framework prior to analyses. The findings are expected to shed light on psychological processes that may serve as barriers to seeking services for children’s mental health.

Authors

• Erin M Kerwin, Southern Methodist University
  Presenting Author

• Brock A. Rigsby, Southern Methodist University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Brendon Reems, Jackson State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Naomi Ekas, Texas Christian University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Chrystyna D Kouros, Southern Methodist University
  Non-Presenting Author