Maladaptive responses to early caregiving are implicated in depression; however, children’s neural reactivity to positive and negative feedback from mothers is poorly understood. We used fMRI to characterize 81 never-depressed children’s (Mage = 11.12 years, SDage = .63) neural responses to hearing their mothers’ praise and criticism. Maternal history of depression was unrelated to children’s brain activity during both the praise and criticism conditions; however, ROI analyses showed that children’s self-reported depressive symptoms were negatively associated with functional activity in the left anterior insula and right putamen while hearing maternal criticism. Whole-brain analyses showed that children’s depressive symptoms were positively associated with left inferior frontal gyrus activity while listening to maternal praise. These findings complement past work implicating these brain regions in emotional salience, reward processing, and internal speech, respectively. Findings further suggest that maladaptive neural processing of maternal feedback may contribute to children’s early emerging depressive symptoms.
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