Sarah Whittle, Murat Yücel, Erika E. Forbes, Christopher G. Davey, Ian H. Harding, Lisa Sheeber, Marie B. H. Yap and Nicholas B. Allen
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Volume7 (1): 23-34, 2012

Abstract

The way that parents express their emotions during interactions with their adolescent children is important for adolescent adjustment, and predicts adolescent emotional problems such as depression. In the current study, we assessed whether adolescent depressive symptoms were associated with neural activity during exposure to their mother’s affective behavior. Thirty adolescents (18 females, mean age 17.35, s.d. 0.43) participated in an fMRI task that used digitized video segments of their own mother’s, as well as an unfamiliar mother’s affective behavior as stimuli. Exposure to one’s own (compared to an unfamiliar) mother’s positive (compared to neutral) behavior was associated with activation in the anterior and posterior cingulate, precuneus and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. In contrast, exposure to positive behavior across own and an unfamiliar mother (controlling for neutral behavior) was associated with superior temporal sulcus, occipital pole, amygdala and striatum activity. Adolescent depressive symptoms were associated with reduced rostral anterior cingulate activity during exposure to one’s own (compared to an unfamiliar) mother’s positive behavior, and reduced striatal activity during exposure to positive behavior in general. This study represents an important step in furthering our understanding of the neural basis of affective processing in adolescents. Further, the results support a disruption of reward function in depression.

Copyright ©  2013 Oxford University Press

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Additional Information:

While much research has focussed on investigating how depressed individuals process still images of exaggerated emotional facial expressions, here we adopted a more ecologically valid paradigm to investigate whether adolescent depressive symptoms predict abnormal neural function during exposure to more personally-relevant emotional stimuli (i.e., adolescents’ own mothers’ emotional behaviour, see Figure 1). This paper builds on a body of work by the authors’ that has aimed to better understand how the family environment interacts with adolescent neurobiological development to promote risk for, or resilience against common adolescent-onset mental health problems, such as depression.