The interplay of childhood maltreatment and maternal depression in relation to the reward positivity in youth

Abstract

Guided by developmental psychopathology and dual-risk frameworks, the present study examined the interplay between childhood maltreatment and maternal major depression history in relation to neural reward responsiveness in youth. The sample consisted of 96 youth (ages 9–16; M = 12.29 years, SD = 2.20; 68.8% female) drawn from a large metropolitan city. Youth were recruited based on whether their mothers had a history of major depressive disorder (MDD) and were categorized into two groups: youth with mothers with a history of MDD (high risk; HR; n = 56) and youth with mothers with no history of psychiatric disorders (low risk; LR; n = 40). The reward positivity (RewP), an event-related potential component, was utilized to measure reward responsiveness and the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire measured childhood maltreatment. We found a significant two-way interaction between childhood maltreatment and risk group in relation to RewP. Simple slope analysis revealed that in the HR group, greater childhood maltreatment was significantly associated with reduced RewP. The relationship between childhood maltreatment and RewP was not significant among the LR youth. The present findings demonstrate that the association between childhood maltreatment and blunted reward responsiveness is dependent on whether offspring have mothers with histories of MDD.

Exposure to intimate partner violence alters longitudinal associations between caregiver depressive symptoms and effortful control in children and adolescents

“…Although CD is known to affect parenting regardless of context (Goodman et al, 2020), our findings are consistent with prior research suggesting that these effects can be exacerbated or attenuated by the quality of family environment (Goldstein et al, 2022;S. Kim & Kochanska, 2021;Suor et al, 2021;Waxman et al, 2014). Taken together, parenting factors may account for the associations between CD and children's and adolescents' EC among IPVþ families in this study.…”

“…CD has a marked influence on key developmental processes across childhood and adolescence, and that the impact of CD on these processes is moderated by contextual factors including violence exposure (Burkhouse & Kujawa, 2022;Suor et al, 2021). Furthermore, adaptive intimate partner relationships have been found to buffer the influence of mothers' depressive symptoms on their young children's EC (Goldstein et al, 2022).…”

Annual Research Review: Emotion processing in offspring of mothers with depression diagnoses – a systematic review of neural and physiological research

“…Moreover, HR versus LR adolescents exhibited an attenuated RewP to social rewards (i.e., peer acceptance; Freeman et al., 2022). Other work indicates that a blunted RewP is particularly evident among HR offspring exposed to negative environmental contexts, such as having a mother displaying lower maternal support and warmth in early childhood (Kujawa, Proudfit, Laptook, & Klein, 2015) or among HR youth experiencing higher levels of childhood maltreatment (Suor, Granros, Calentino, Phan, & Burkhouse, 2022). More recent work has decomposed RewP into frequency bands, with greater delta band power reflecting more sensitivity to reward feedback.…”