Electrocortical reactivity to emotional faces in young children and associations with maternal and paternal depression

Research on emotion-processing biases in offspring of depressed parents has produced a variety of findings. Child persistent irritability may be a useful clinical feature that demarcates subgroups of offspring with distinct patterns of emotion processing. The present study examined whether early persistent irritability moderated the relationship between maternal lifetime history of a depressive disorder and appetitive- and aversive-emotion processing in 338 never-depressed pre-adolescent children (43.8% female). When children were 3, mothers were interviewed about children’s persistent irritability. Six years later, EEG was recorded while children completed a task in which the late positive potential (LPP), a neural index of emotional reactivity, was measured in response to appetitive, aversive, and neutral images. At both assessments, mothers were interviewed about their own psychopathology. Among offspring of depressed mothers, children characterized by high levels of early persistent irritability showed an enhanced LPP to appetitive and aversive compared to neutral images (i.e., ΔLPP), whereas children with low levels of early irritability showed attenuated ΔLPPs. In offspring of mothers with no history of depression, there was no association between irritability and emotion processing. Findings suggest that persistent irritability influences the pattern of emotion-processing aberrations in offspring of depressed mothers.

Children of parents with depression exhibit neural abnormalities in reward processing. Examining contributions of parenting could provide insight into the development of these abnormalities and to the etiology of depression. We evaluated whether early parenting moderates the effects of parental depression on a neural measure of reward and loss processing in mid-late childhood. Parenting was assessed when children were preschoolers. At age nine, children completed an event-related potential assessment and the feedback negativity (FN) was measured following rewards and losses (N=344). Maternal authoritative parenting moderated the effect of maternal depression; among offspring of mothers with histories of depression, low authoritative parenting predicted a blunted FN. Observed maternal positive parenting interacted with paternal depression in a comparable manner, indicating that maternal parenting may buffer the effects of paternal depression. Early parenting may be important in shaping the neural systems involved in reward processing among children at high risk for depression.

The NIMH Research Domain Criteria initiative (RDoC) seeks to re-conceptualize psychopathology by identifying transdiagnostic constructs that reflect core mechanisms of psychopathology. Although the RDoC framework has been discussed in a many prior papers, there are several methodological and conceptual points that have yet to be fully specified. For example, little discussion exists on the importance of distinguishing each construct’s nomological network and linking it to risk for psychopathology. It has also been unclear the extent to which RDoC constructs (within and across systems) should relate to one another and how these associations may differ as a function of developmental period. These are important questions as we enter the RDoC era and psychophysiological measures represent an exciting tool to address these issues. In this paper, we discuss the currently un- (or under-)specified aspects of the RDoC initiative and highlight the advantages of the psychophysiological ‘unit of analysis.’ We also briefly review existing psychophysiological studies, within the positive and negative valence systems, that exemplify the RDoC approach and make recommendations for how future studies can help the field progress in this mission.