A review of associations between parental emotion socialization behaviors and the neural substrates of emotional reactivity and regulation in youth.

Abstract

As highlighted by Eisenberg, Cumberland, and Spinrad (1998), parents play a critical role in children’s socioemotional development, in part, by shaping how children and adolescents process, respond to, and regulate their emotions (i.e., emotional reactivity/regulation). Although evidence for associations between parenting behavior and youth’s emotional processing has relied primarily on behavioral measures of emotion, researchers have begun to examine how parenting is related to the neural substrates of youth’s reactivity and regulation. This article reviews a growing literature linking parental behavior with structural brain development as well as functional activity and connectivity in neural regions supporting emotional reactivity/regulation during infancy, childhood, and adolescence. By focusing on normative parental behaviors, we evaluate the evidence for associations between typical variations in caregiving and neural processes thought to support youth’s emotional reactivity/regulation. The purpose of this review is to (1) extend the model put forth by Eisenberg and colleagues to consider the ways that parenting behaviors are related to neural substrates of youth’s emotional reactivity and regulation; (2) review the empirical evidence for associations between parenting, particularly parental “emotion-related socialization behaviors” (ERSBs), and neural substrates of youth’s emotional reactivity/regulation; and (3) recommend future directions for this emerging area of research.

Emotion context insensitivity in depression: Toward an integrated and contextualized approach

“…Emotion regulation abilities, such as cognitive reappraisal skills, critical for the regulation of negative affect, also increase with age (McRae et al., 2012). Family interactions and parenting behaviors are particularly important in the development of emotion regulation skills (Bylsma, et al., 2016; Morris et al., 2007; Tan et al., 2020).…”

“…For example, according to differential susceptibility models based on evolutionary biology perspectives, there may be specific endophenotypes (such as physiological reactivity patterns) that confer greater susceptibility to positive and/or negative environmental influences in some individuals (Belsky & Pluess, 2009). Along these lines, there is evidence that certain parental emotion socialization behaviors have a differential influence on youth emotional reactivity and regulation that is depending on functional and structural brain development, including functional connectivity of emotion circuits, highlighting the importance of cross‐level interactions between socio‐environmental influences in the development of neurobiological systems (Tan et al., 2020). In addition, bidirectional effects have been found in examinations of relationships between early life adversity and physiology, such that early life adversity is associated with reduced RSA, but parasympathetic or sympathetic physiological reactivity can also buffer or moderate the impact of early life adversity on emotional or behavioral difficulties (Orbradovic & Boyce, 2012, for review).…”

Parenting and Offspring Brain Development: What Do We Know?

“…Nevertheless, studies to date offer important insights into potential influences of parenting on offspring brain development. In particular, of the various brain regions examined in the studies included in this review, the majority have focused on subcortical, including limbic, striatal regions, and hippocampal regions, as well as prefrontal cortical regions (e.g., Butterfield et al, 2020;Kopala-Sibley et al, 2020;Morgan et al, 2014;Whittle et al, 2013;Pagliaccio et al, 2015;Pozzi et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2019). This may be in part because at least some of these studies stemmed from broader cohort studies whose primary focus was understanding child and adolescent risk factors for adverse behavioural outcomes, in particular psychopathology such as depression and anxiety (e.g., Pagliaccio et al, 2015;Whittle et al, 2013Whittle et al, , 2016.…”

“…For excellent reviews pertaining to specific parenting practices and the development of specific neural circuits, such as emotion and reward processing circuitry we refer the reader to recent work dedicated to this question (e.g., Kujawa et al, 2020;Tan et al, 2020). We also do not provide a detailed overview of naturalistic child and adolescent brain development as this has been covered in numerous excellent reviews (e.g., Belsky & de Haan, 2011;Grayson & Fair, 2017;Tamnes et al, 2018;Vijayakumar et al, 2018).…”

“…Moreover, despite the fact that the large majority of children will experience variability in the "normative" (i.e., non-maltreating) parenting they receive, our knowledge of how the experiences of most children affect brain development is surprisingly limited. To date, a handful(Table 1)of studies have examined the effects of normative parenting in infants, children, or adolescents (e.g.,Butterfield et al, 2020;…”