Maternal major depression and synchrony of facial affect during mother-child interactions.

Abstract

Maternal history of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) dramatically increases children's risk for developing depression, highlighting the critical need for further research on the specific processes involved in the intergenerational transmission of depression. Although previous research suggests that maternal depression may adversely affect the quality of mother-child interactions, less is known about the role of maternal MDD in the moment-to-moment changes in affect that occur during these interactions. The goal of this project, therefore, was to examine synchrony of facial displays of affect during a positive (Vacation Planning) and a negative (Issues Discussion) mother-child interaction, and how this synchrony may be impacted by maternal history of MDD. In doing so, we examined both concurrent and lagged synchrony of facial affect. We recruited 341 mother-child dyads (child average age ϭ 9.30 years; 50.1% girls; 71.6% Caucasian) with and without a maternal history of MDD. Facial electromyography (EMG), continuously recorded during those tasks, was used to index mother and child facial affect. We found that a maternal history of MDD was associated with reduced concurrent synchrony and lagged synchrony (mother facial affect predicting changes in child facial affect) of positive affect during Vacation Planning. Reduced concurrent mother-child synchrony of positive affect during the discussion was also associated with an increase in child self-reported sad affect from before to after the discussion. These findings provide promising initial evidence for how the dynamic exchange of positive affect during mother-child interactions may be disrupted in families with maternal MDD history.

Preschoolers’ emotion reactivity and regulation: Links with maternal psychological distress and child behavior problems

“…On the environmental front, depressive mood may influence the quality of caregiving. Parents who are high on depressive mood may be prone to cultivate disrupted or nonsynchronous coregulation processes (Kudinova et al, 2019;Woody et al, 2016) or exhibit unsupportive emotion socialization processes (Williams & Woodruff-Borden, 2015), thus increasing children's risk for developing inefficient emotion regulation. Such caregiving patterns may be rather marked in the context of fear or threat.…”

Always on my mind: Cross-brain associations of mental health symptoms during simultaneous parent-child scanning

“…Third, because participants were shown different stimuli during the TEAM task (i.e., their own responses and pre-programmed partner responses), our analyses focused on regional activation patterns within each group (i.e., parents and adolescents) rather than trial-by-trial synchrony or cross-brain connectivity (i.e., concurrent and time-lagged connectivity between parent and adolescent brain regions). Physiological synchrony between dyads is thought to be beneficial for healthy parent-child interactions and later child outcomes (Feldman, 2007; Kudinova et al, 2019). Therefore, future research with more continuous interaction tasks (i.e., parent-adolescent conflict tasks) would be ideal for assessing how neural synchrony between parents and adolescents may relate to mental health.…”

Maternal negative affect moderates behavioral and physiological synchrony in Latinx and Black mother–child dyads

“…Contrary to hypothesis 1, maternal depressive symptoms were not significantly associated with PBS. We expected this relation given prior work that found maternal depressive symptoms related to reduced and lagged PBS (Kudinova et al, 2019;Pratt et al, 2019). The lack of relation between maternal depressive symptoms and PBS may be partially explained by cultural differences regarding maternal reporting of internalizing symptoms.…”