Maternal response to child affect: Role of maternal depression and relationship quality

Abstract

Background Maternal depression is associated with negative outcomes for offspring, including increased incidence of child psychopathology. Quality of mother-child relationships can be compromised among affectively ill dyads, such as those characterized by maternal depression and child psychopathology, and negatively impact outcomes bidirectionally. Little is known about the neural mechanisms that may modulate depressed mothers’ responses to their psychiatrically ill children during middle childhood and adolescence, partially because of a need for ecologically valid personally relevant fMRI tasks that might most effectively elicit these neural mechanisms. Methods The current project evaluated maternal response to child positive and negative affective video clips in 19 depressed mothers with psychiatrically ill offspring using a novel fMRI task. Results The task elicited activation in the ventral striatum when mothers viewed positive clips and insula when mothers viewed negative clips of their own (versus unfamiliar) children. Both types of clips elicited activation in regions associated with affect regulation and self-related and social processing. Greater lifetime number of depressive episodes, comorbid anxiety, and poor mother-child relationship quality all emerged as predictors of maternal response to child affect. Limitations Findings may be specific to dyads with psychiatrically ill children. Conclusions Altered neural response to child affect may be an important characteristic of chronic maternal depression and may impact mother-child relationships negatively. Existing interventions for depression may be improved by helping mothers respond to their children’s affect more adaptively.

Maternal Neurobiological Processing of Negative Adolescent Stimuli: Relations With Positive Parenting and Relationship Quality

“…However, in one study during this developmental period, Morgan et al. () found that mothers with a greater history of recurrent depressive episodes recruited higher levels of self‐related processing regions—including the precuneus and precentral gyrus—and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) when viewing video clips of their adolescent expressing negative emotion (Morgan et al., ). Moreover, authors found that lower maternal warmth and higher maternal hostility were associated with less activation in regulatory (e.g., vmPFC, dlPFC) and self‐related processing regions (e.g., precuneus, PCC) to the video clips of their adolescent.…”

“…However, based on findings from Morgan et al. (), the direction of effects related to self‐related or referential processing regions remains unclear—it may be that higher precuneus/PCC activation is associated with poorer maternal functioning (e.g., depression) or that lower precuneus/PCC is associated with maladaptive parenting (e.g., maternal hostility).…”

“…This study indicates that networks implicated in infant caregiving, such as emotional regulation networks, remain relevant throughout development and also highlights the involvement of self-related processing circuitry in response to adolescent stimuli. However, based on findings from Morgan et al (2015), the direction of effects related to self-related or referential processing regions remains unclear-it may be that higher precuneus/PCC activation is associated with poorer maternal functioning (e.g., depression) or that lower precuneus/PCC is associated with maladaptive parenting (e.g., maternal hostility).…”

The maternal brain in women with a history of early-life maltreatment: an imagination-based fMRI study of conflictual versus pleasant interactions with children

“…22 Additionally, stronger anterior insula activation in response to negative infant stimuli has been reported in intrusive and depressed mothers. 23,24 Hence, increased salience of infants' negative cues and heightened affective response to them may promote emotionally overwhelmed, intrusive responses in mothers, instead of sensitive exchange and bonding with the child. Furthermore, sensitive mothers show stronger activations in the lateral frontal pole region and inferior frontal gyrus as a result of negative cues from their own infant, 23,25 and nondepressed mothers (but not depressed mothers) showed greater response to their infant's cry in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex.…”

“…Since lifetime history of a mental disorder influenced maternal sensitivity, we controlled for this in the fMRI analyses, underlining the specificity of the observed neural changes for ELM. Contrary to previous studies, [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26] we focused on mothers of primary-school-aged children, an age group that, to our knowledge, has not been addressed before.…”