(PS3-D99) Neural Indices of Maternal Emotion Regulation Predict Adolescents’ Anxiety Vulnerability Two Years Later

Background: The Late Positive Potential (LPP) is an Event-Related Potential (ERP) component of the electroencephalogram (EEG) that has been used to study emotional processing and emotion regulation. Larger LPP indicates greater attentional sensitivity towards emotional stimuli. Adolescence is a period when significant developmental changes take place in the brain, making this age group especially vulnerable to experience disrupted emotion regulation. This in turn may lead to the development of anxiety disorders. While many factors may affect adolescent’s onset of anxiety disorders, previous studies have found that parental anxiety is a predictor of children’s anxiety symptoms. In the current study, we examined whether LPP, as an index of emotion regulation, may be a mechanistic predictor for intergenerational transmission of anxiety vulnerability.

Methods: As part of a larger study, we recruited 83 adolescents between 11 to 14 years old and their mothers to complete the Emotional Interrupt Task (EIT) while we recorded their brain activity using EEG at two timepoints separated by two years. We measured adolescents’ and mothers’ LPP separately following the presentation of positive, neutral, and negative images.

Results: There was a positive correlation between child’s LPP at baseline and follow-up. Moreover, children’s LPP generally increased in two-year time, both for positive and negative stimuli. Results of a regression analysis revealed that mother’s baseline emotion reactivity to negative stimuli (negative ΔLPP; B = 0.34, SE = 0.17, p = .04) significantly predicted their adolescent’s LPP to negative stimuli two years later, even after controlling for adolescent’s LPP at baseline (B = 0.19, SE = 0.07, p = .005). Specifically, mothers with higher negative ΔLPP at baseline tended to have children with higher negative ΔLPP two years later in adolescence. No such relationships existed for positive stimuli.

Conclusions: Our findings suggest that the reactivity to negative stimuli relative to neutral stimuli in both mother and child may have a unique predictive power in determining child’s vulnerability to anxiety in the future. This suggests one potential mechanism underlying the intergenerational transmission of anxiety that can be targeted with treatment to prevent adolescent in developing psychological disorders that are characterized by disrupted emotion regulation.