No abstract

The distorting influence of maternal depression on the ratings of child behaviour is known as the depression-distortion hypothesis. This study investigated the depression-distortion hypothesis in a clinical sample of child psychiatric preschool children and extended the depression-distortion-hypothesis to maternal psychopathology-distortion-hypothesis in general. Subjects were 124 children, who were referred for treatment in a Child Psychiatric Family Day Hospital for preschool children, and their parents. Children were rated on the CBCL/1.5-5 and the C-TRF/1.5-5 by their mothers, kindergarten teachers and therapists.

Emotion regulation has an important role in child development and psychopathology. Reappraisal as cognitive regulation technique can be used effectively by children. Moreover, an ERP component known to reflect emotional processing called late positive potential (LPP) can be modulated by children using reappraisal and this modulation is also related to children's emotional adjustment. The present study seeks to elucidate the neural generators of such LPP effects. To this end, children aged 8-14 years reappraised emotional faces, while neural activity in an LPP time window was estimated using magnetoencephalography-based source localization. Additionally, neural activity was correlated with two indexes of emotional adjustment and age. Reappraisal reduced activity in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during down-regulation and enhanced activity in the right parietal cortex during up-regulation. Activity in the visual cortex decreased with increasing age, more adaptive emotion regulation and less anxiety. Results demonstrate that reappraisal changed activity within a frontoparietal network in children. Decreasing activity in the visual cortex with increasing age is suggested to reflect neural maturation. A similar decrease with adaptive emotion regulation and less anxiety implies that better emotional adjustment may be associated with an advance in neural maturation.

According to the guidelines published by the German Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy (2007), regulatory disorders of early childhood are characterized by a symptom triad, including (a) behavioral symptoms such as excessive crying, sleeping, or feeding problems; (b) a disturbed parent-child relationship; and (c) parental psychopathology. On the basis of a clinic-referred sample of 162 children, we examined whether children with and without regulatory symptoms differed in the quality of parent-child relationship and parental mental health, and how often the criteria of the symptom triad were fulfilled in the group of children with regulatory symptoms. In addition, emotional and behavior problems were compared in children with and without regulatory symptoms. Children with regulatory symptoms and children with other psychiatric symptoms did not differ with respect to child-parent relationship quality. However, parents of children with regulatory symptoms scored higher on the Symptom Checklist 90 Items-Revised (G.H. Franke, 2002) than did the other parents. On the Child Behavior Checklist (T.M. Achenbach & L.A. Rescorla, 2000), children with regulatory symptoms tended to show more somatic problems, but they showed significantly less withdrawn behavior than did the other children. Of the 67 children with regulatory symptoms, only 11 (16.4%) fulfilled all three criteria of a regulatory disorder.

Parenting behavior has a significant influence on children's mental health and may contribute to the development of emotional or behavior problems in children. Differences in parenting behavior have been related to parent personality and to child temperament, although the direction of causality is not yet clear. This review seeks to provide an overview of the relation between child mental health, parenting, parent personality, and child temperament with a special focus on the interaction effects of parent personality on child temperament. Empirical evidence suggested that child and parent characteristics both-additively and interactively-contribute to parenting behavior. There were only a few studies that explicitly considered interaction effects, and most of them focused on negative effects. More research is necessary to investigate the interaction of parent personality and child temperament and the related child outcomes further. Counseling, family therapy, and other parenting-oriented interventions may benefit from individual adaptations to both parental personality and child temperament.