Always on my mind: Cross-brain associations of mental health symptoms during simultaneous parent-child scanning

Publication date: Available online 5 November 2019Source: Developmental Cognitive NeuroscienceAuthor(s): Kelly T. Cosgrove, Kara L. Kerr, Robin L. Aupperle, Erin L. Ratliff, Danielle C. DeVille, Jennifer S. Silk, Kaiping Burrows, Andrew J. Moore, Chase Antonacci, Masaya Misaki, Susan F. Tapert, Jerzy Bodurka, W. Kyle Simmons, Amanda Sheffield MorrisAbstractHow parents manifest symptoms of anxiety or depression may affect how children learn to modulate their own distress, thereby influencing the children's risk for developing an anxiety or mood disorder. Conversely, children’s mental health symptoms may impact parents' experiences of negative emotions. Therefore, mental health symptoms can have bidirectional effects in parent-child relationships, particularly during moments of distress or frustration (e.g., when a parent or child makes a costly mistake). The present study used simultaneous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of parent-adolescent dyads to examine how brain activity when responding to each other's costly errors (i.e., dyadic error processing) may be associated with symptoms of anxiety and depression. While undergoing simultaneous fMRI scans, healthy dyads completed a task involving feigned errors that indicated their family member made a costly mistake. Inter-brain, random-effects multivariate modeling revealed that parents who exhibited decreased medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex activation when viewing their child's costly erro...
Source: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience - Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research