Adolescents' neural responses to their parents' emotions: associations with emotion regulation, internalizing symptoms, and substance use

Parental emotion expression has been linked to adolescent emotional and psychopathology development. However, neural responses to parental emotion are not well characterized. The present study examined associations between adolescents' neural responses to parent emotion and adolescents' emotion regulation (ER) difficulties, depressive and anxiety symptoms, and substance use (SU). One hundred seventy-five 12- to 14-year-olds and their parent(s) participated in the study. In a lab session, families completed a parent-adolescent interaction task. In an MRI session, adolescents viewed videos of their own parents and unfamiliar parents expressing positive, negative, and neutral emotions from the interaction task. Higher salience region responses to own parent negative emotion (versus neutral) in ventral anterior cingulate cortex (vACC), anterior insula (AI), and nucleus accumbens (NAc) were associated with adolescent ER difficulties and depressive and anxiety symptoms. Higher vACC and AI responses to parent positive emotion (versus neutral) were associated with anxiety symptoms only. Higher salience region responses to own parent negative emotion (versus other parent negative) were associated with ER difficulties. Responses to own parent positive emotion (versus other parent positive) were associated with ER and anxiety symptoms for boys. Findings suggest that adolescents' salience system sensitivity to parental emotion may be important in the development of ER and internalizing symptoms.