The Associations of Maternal Emotion Dysregulation and Parenting Behavior with White Matter Integrity in Children Open Access
Wang, Chenyang (Spring 2021)
Abstract
Background
Parental emotion regulation plays a significant role in parents’ interactions with their children, influencing the development of children’s emotional and cognitive processes. These interactions are known to affect neural plasticity, particularly during sensitive periods of development. However, little is known about how parental emotion dysregulation (ED) and parenting style is associated with variation in children’s brain structure, including white matter (WM) connectivity, which was the goal of this study.
Methods
Forty-five African American mother-child dyads were recruited from an intergenerational trauma study; mothers were given ED and parenting style (parenting questionnaire, PQ) measures. Diffusion-weighted images were collected, and child emotion regulation measures were administered to children; deterministic tractography was used to reconstruct WM pathways relevant to emotion regulation. Metrics of WM microstructure and connectivity (e.g., fractional anisotropy (FA), mean diffusivity (MD), and radial diffusivity (RD)) were extracted for each pathway.
Results
Maternal ED negatively correlated with connectivity metrics of the right fornix (MD: r=0.48, p=0.001; RD: r=0.46, p=0.002). No significant correlations were observed between child WM indices and the PQ. Parent-report sadness inhibition negatively correlated with MD of the right cingulum bundle (r=-0.44, p=0.003), whereas child-report anger inhibition positively correlated with RD of the right superior longitudinal fasciculus segment 3 (r=0.44, p=0.003).
Conclusion
ED in parents may influence the development of a hippocampal-striatal pathway (e.g., fornix) which is implicated in reward/motivation; child anger and sadness inhibition may influence different white matter tracts implicated in ER and stress response. These data suggest that dysregulated parenting may adversely impact adaptation to trauma/stress in children by affecting the connectivity of these WM pathways.
Table of Contents
Chapter I. Introduction 1
Chapter II. Literature Review 7
Chapter III. Methodology 21
Chapter IV. Results 27
Chapter V. Conclusions 29
References 35
Appendix 55
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