Morgan JK, Silk JS, Woods BK, Forbes EE. Differential neural responding to affective stimuli in 6- to 8-year old children at high familial risk for depression: Associations with behavioral reward seeking.
J Affect Disord 2019;
257:445-453. [PMID:
31310906 PMCID:
PMC6711822 DOI:
10.1016/j.jad.2019.06.058]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 9] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/28/2019] [Revised: 05/17/2019] [Accepted: 06/30/2019] [Indexed: 11/23/2022]
Abstract
OBJECTIVE
Children of depressed parents are at increased risk for psychopathology. One putative mechanism of risk appears to be altered processing of emotion-related stimuli. Although prior work has evaluated how adolescent offspring of depressed parents may show blunted reward processing compared to low-risk youth, there has been less attention to how young children with this familial history may differ from their peers during middle childhood, a period of critical socio-affective development METHOD: The current study evaluated 56 emotionally healthy 6-to 8-year children who were deemed at high-risk (n = 25) or low-risk (n = 31) for depression based on maternal history of depression. Children completed a behavioral reward seeking task in the laboratory and an fMRI paradigm assessing neural response to happy faces, a social reward.
RESULTS
Findings demonstrated that high-risk children showed blunted responding to happy faces in the dorsal striatum compared to low-risk children. Further, lower responding in the dorsal striatum and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was related to lower behavioral reward seeking, but only in high-risk children.
CONCLUSION
Function within neural reward regions may be altered in high-risk offspring as young as 6- to 8-years of age. Further, neural reward responding may be linked to lower behavioral response to obtain reward in these high-risk offspring.
Collapse