Parental Presence Impacts a Neural Correlate of Anxiety (the Late Positive Potential) in 5-7 Year Old Children: Interactions with Parental Sensitivity to Child Anxiety.

Parental Presence Impacts a Neural Correlate of Anxiety (the Late Positive Potential) in 5-7 Year Old Children: Interactions with Parental Sensitivity to Child Anxiety. J Abnorm Child Psychol. 2020 Apr 22;: Authors: Day TN, Chong LJ, Meyer A Abstract Anxiety disorders tend to onset early in development and often result in chronic impairment across the lifespan. Thus, there is substantial interest in identifying early neural markers of anxiety and leveraging these markers to better understand processes leading to anxiety. The late positive potential (i.e., LPP) indexes sustained attention to motivationally relevant stimuli; and the LPP to negative images is increased in individuals with anxiety. In the current study, we examined how parental presence impacts the LPP to threatening images in children (52.6% male) between 5 and 7 years-old (N = 78). Moreover, we explored interactions with parental sensitivity to child anxiety symptoms. Results suggest that when children are in the presence of their parent (compared to the presence of an experimenter), they displayed a larger LPP to threatening images. LPP activity was modulated by parental response to their child's anxiety symptoms, such that children with parents who were overly reactive to their children's anxiety symptoms had the greatest LPP response when viewing threatening stimuli in their parent's presence. Additionally, exploratory analyses indicated that children with clin...
Source: Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: J Abnorm Child Psychol Source Type: research