The Impact of Depression on Mothers' Neural Processing of Their Adolescents' Affective Behavior

Associations Between Parenting Behavior and Neural Processing of Adolescent Faces in Mothers With and Without Depression

BACKGROUND

This study first examined how mothers with and without depression differ in neural activation in response to adolescents' affective faces. Second, it examined the extent to which these neural activation patterns are related to observed positive and aggressive parenting behavior.

METHODS

Mothers with and without depression (based on self-reported symptoms and treatment history; n = 77 and n = 64, respectively; meanage = 40 years) from low-income families completed an interaction task with their adolescents (meanage = 12.8 years), which was coded for parents' aggressive and positive affective behavior. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, mothers viewed blurry, happy, sad, and angry faces of unfamiliar adolescents, with an instruction to either label the emotion or determine the clarity of the image.

RESULTS

The depression group showed less activation in the posterior midcingulate than the control subject group while labeling happy faces. Higher activation in the insula and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (PFC) was related to less positive parenting behavior. Ventrolateral PFC activation was most pronounced when labeling negative emotions, but stronger ventrolateral PFC response to happy faces was associated with more aggressive parenting behavior.

CONCLUSIONS

This demonstrates the association between parents' neural responses to adolescent faces and their behavior during interactions with their own adolescents, with relatively low insula and dorsomedial PFC activation supporting positive parenting and affect-dependent response in the ventrolateral PFC as being important to limit aggressive behavior.

Coding Dyadic Behavior in Caregiver-Child Interaction from a Clinical Psychology Perspective: How Should Multiple Instruments and Outcomes Be Dealt with?

The experiences children have in the interactions with their caregivers influence their developmental outcomes. To target caregiving and optimize intervention effects, the assessment of caregiver-child interactions is highly relevant for families affected by parental mental disorders. Behavioral observation is a widely used method for assessing family dynamics, and the literature offers a wide variety of instruments with which to code such data. However, a structured overview of behavioral observation instruments (BOIs) is lacking, and the multitude of types of dyadic behaviors (DBs) assessed within each BOI are complicating their application. We aim to provide an overview of the BOIs applied to families affected by mental disorders and suggest a DB taxonomy that may be used across BOIs. We first conducted a systemic literature search to identify the most frequently used BOIs and the DBs they capture in clinical psychology. Second, we asked 13 experts to sort DB terms based on perceived conceptual similarity and analyzed these results using multidimensional scaling. We found approximately 450 different terms for DBs, and we argue that DBs can be classified within two overarching dimensions, i.e., in terms of structure and in terms of reaction to a child's signals. These efforts can facilitate the coding and application of BOIs in clinical practice.