Constructing the "Family Personality": Can Family Functioning Be Linked to Parent-Child Interpersonal Neural Synchronization?

INTRODUCTION: Early child development occurs within an interactive environment, initially dominated by parents or caregivers, and is heavily influenced by the dynamics of this social context. The current study probed the neurobiology of "family personality", or family functioning, in the context of parent-child dyadic interaction using a two-person neuroimaging modality. METHODS: One hundred and five parent-child dyads (child mean age 5 years 4 months) were recruited. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning was employed to measure neural synchrony while dyads completed a mildly stressful interactive task. Family functioning was measured through the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Scale IV (FACES-IV). RESULTS: Synchrony during stress was significantly greater than synchrony during both baseline and recovery conditions for all dyads. A significant interaction between neural synchrony in each task condition and familial balanced flexibility was found, such that higher levels of balanced flexibility were associated with greater changes in frontal cortex neural synchrony as dyads progressed through the three task conditions. DISCUSSION: Parent-child dyads from families who display heightened levels of balanced flexibility are also more flexible in their engagement of neural synchrony when shifting between social conditions. This is one of the first studies to utilize a two-person imaging modality to explore the links between family functioning and interbrain synchrony between parents and their children.

Pupillary Responses to Dynamic Negative Versus Positive Facial Expressions of Emotion in Children and Parents: Links to Depression and Anxiety.

Witnessing emotional expressions in others triggers physiological arousal in humans. The current study focused on pupil responses to emotional expressions in a community sample as a physiological index of arousal and attention. We explored the associations between parents' and offspring's responses to dynamic facial expressions of emotion, as well as the links between pupil responses and anxiety/depression. Children (N = 90, MAge = 10.13, range = 7.21-12.94, 47 girls) participated in this lab study with one of their parents (47 mothers). Pupil responses were assessed in a computer task with dynamic happy, angry, fearful, and sad expressions, while participants verbally labeled the emotion displayed on the screen as quickly as possible. Parents and children reported anxiety and depression symptoms in questionnaires. Both parents and children showed stronger pupillary responses to negative versus positive expressions, and children's responses were overall stronger than those of parents. We also found links between the pupil responses of parents and children to negative, especially to angry faces. Child pupil responses were related to their own and their parents' anxiety levels and to their parents' (but not their own) depression. We conclude that child pupils are sensitive to individual differences in parents' pupils and emotional dispositions in community samples.

Bidirectional Relations Among Maternal Positive Emotion, Infant Positive Emotionality, and Infant Physiological Regulation Across the First 18 Months of Life.

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), a marker of self-regulation, has been linked to developmental outcomes in young children. Although positive emotions may have the potential to facilitate physiological self-regulation, and enhanced self-regulation could underlie the development of positive emotions in early childhood, the relation between positive emotions and physiological self-regulation in infancy has been relatively overlooked. The current study examined the bidirectional associations among maternal positive emotion, infant positive emotionality, and infant resting RSA across the first 18 months of life. We used data from the Longitudinal Attention and Temperament Study (LanTs; N = 309 in the current analysis) to test the within- and between-person relations of study variables over time using a random-intercepts cross-lagged panel model. We found that infants with higher overall levels of positive emotionality also displayed greater resting RSA, and their mothers exhibited higher levels of positive emotion. However, there were negative cross-lagged associations within-person; higher than average infant positive emotionality predicted lower levels of infant resting RSA at the subsequent timepoint during early infancy, whereas higher than average infant RSA subsequently predicted decreased levels of infant positive emotionality later in infancy. Results highlight the importance of considering transactional relations between positive emotion and physiological self-regulation in infancy.

Interactions among stress, behavioral inhibition, and delta-beta coupling predict adolescent anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about unprecedented changes and uncertainty to the daily lives of youth. The range of adjustment in light of a near-universal experience of COVID restrictions highlights the importance of identifying factors that may render some individuals more susceptible to heightened levels of anxiety during stressful life events than others. Two risk factors to consider are temperamental behavioral inhibition (BI) and difficulties in emotion regulation (ER). As such, the current paper focused on BI examined prior to COVID, because of its developmental link to anxiety and ER, as difficulties may be associated with differences in anxiety. We examined a neurocognitive marker of ER processes, delta-beta coupling (DBC). The current paper had two goals: (1) to examine BI in relation to COVID-related worry and social anxiety experienced during the pandemic, and (2) to explore the role of individual differences in early DBC in the relationship between BI and anxiety outcomes 6 months apart during COVID-19 (n = 86; T1 Mage  = 15.95, SD = 1.73; T6 Mage  = 16.43, SD = 1.73). We found support for the moderating role of DBC in the relationship between BI levels and social anxiety disorder (SAD) symptom severity during the pandemic. Here, high BI was predictive of increased SAD symptom levels in adolescents with stronger DBC.

"Nobody Here Likes Her"-The Impact of Parental Verbal Threat Information on Children's Fear of Strangers.

Parental verbal threat (vs. safety) information about strangers may induce fears of these strangers in adolescents. In this multi-method experimental study, utilizing a within-subject design, parents provided standardized verbal threat or safety information to their offspring (N = 77, Mage = 11.62 years, 42 girls) regarding two strangers in the lab. We also explored whether the impact of parental verbal threat information differs depending on the social anxiety levels of parents or fearful temperaments of adolescents. Adolescent's fear of strangers during social interaction tasks was assessed using cognitive (fear beliefs, attention bias), behavioral (observed avoidance and anxiety), and physiological (heart rate) indices. We also explored whether the impact of parental verbal threat information differs depending on the social anxiety levels of parents or fearful temperaments of adolescents. The findings suggest that a single exposure to parental verbal threat (vs. safety) information increased adolescent's self-reported fears about the strangers but did not increase their fearful behaviors, heart rate, or attentional bias. Furthermore, adolescents of parents with higher social anxiety levels or adolescents with fearful temperaments were not more strongly impacted by parental verbal threat information. Longitudinal research and studies investigating parents' naturalistic verbal expressions of threat are needed to expand our understanding of this potential verbal fear-learning pathway.

Adolescent coping and social media use moderated anxiety change during the COVID-19 pandemic.

INTRODUCTION: Adolescence is a sensitive period during which stressors and social disruptions uniquely contribute to anxiety symptoms. Adolescent's coping strategies (i.e., avoidance and approach) during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic may be differentially related to anxiety symptom changes. Further, social media use (SMU) is ubiquitous and may serve as an avenue to deploy avoidant and/or approach coping. METHOD: Participants included 265 adolescents (ages 12-20 years; 55.8% female, 43.8% male) and one parent per adolescent. At two time points separated by ~6 months, adolescents reported on SMU and coping strategies, and parents and adolescents reported demographic information and adolescents' anxiety symptoms. Data were collected online in the United States, from summer 2020 through spring 2021. RESULTS: Increases in avoidant coping predicted increasing anxiety, particularly when approach coping decreased. Decreases in both avoidant coping and SMU coincided with decreasing anxiety. Older adolescents showed decreasing anxiety when avoidant coping declined and SMU increased. CONCLUSION: Coping strategies and SMU predicted patterns of adolescent anxiety symptom change across 6 months during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results highlight that coping and SMU should be contextualized within the time course of stressors.

Implementing mobile eye tracking in psychological research: A practical guide.

Eye tracking provides direct, temporally and spatially sensitive measures of eye gaze. It can capture visual attention patterns from infancy through adulthood. However, commonly used screen-based eye tracking (SET) paradigms are limited in their depiction of how individuals process information as they interact with the environment in "real life". Mobile eye tracking (MET) records participant-perspective gaze in the context of active behavior. Recent technological developments in MET hardware enable researchers to capture egocentric vision as early as infancy and across the lifespan. However, challenges remain in MET data collection, processing, and analysis. The present paper aims to provide an introduction and practical guide to starting researchers in the field to facilitate the use of MET in psychological research with a wide range of age groups. First, we provide a general introduction to MET. Next, we briefly review MET studies in adults and children that provide new insights into attention and its roles in cognitive and socioemotional functioning. We then discuss technical issues relating to MET data collection and provide guidelines for data quality inspection, gaze annotations, data visualization, and statistical analyses. Lastly, we conclude by discussing the future directions of MET implementation. Open-source programs for MET data quality inspection, data visualization, and analysis are shared publicly.

Developmental trajectories of behavioral inhibition from infancy to age seven: The role of genetic and environmental risk for psychopathology.

The present study leveraged data from a longitudinal adoption study of 361 families recruited between 2003 and 2010 in the United States. We investigated how psychopathology symptoms in birth parents (BP; Mage  = 24.1 years; 50.5-62.9% completed high school) and adoptive parents (AP; Mage  = 37.8 years; 80.9% completed college; 94% mother-father couples) influenced children's behavioral inhibition (BI) trajectories. We used latent growth models of observed BI at 18 and 27 months, and 4.5 and 7 years in a sample of adopted children (Female = 42%, White = 57%, Black = 11%, Multi-racial = 21%, Latinx = 9%). BI generally decreased over time, yet there was substantial variability in these trajectories. Neither BP nor AP psychopathology symptoms independently predicted systematic differences in BI trajectories. Instead, we found that AP internalizing symptoms moderated the effects of BP psychopathology on trajectories of BI, indicating a gene by environment interaction.

Variability in caregiver attention bias to threat: A Goldilocks effect in infant emotional development?

Attention biases to threat are considered part of the etiology of anxiety disorders. Attention bias variability (ABV) quantifies intraindividual fluctuations in attention biases and may better capture the relation between attention biases and psychopathology risk versus mean levels of attention bias. ABV to threat has been associated with attentional control and emotion regulation, which may impact how caregivers interact with their child. In a relatively diverse sample of infants (50% White, 50.7% female), we asked how caregiver ABV to threat related to trajectories of infant negative affect across the first 2 years of life. Families were part of a multi-site longitudinal study, and data were collected from 4 to 24 months of age. Multilevel modeling examined the effect of average caregiver attention biases on changes in negative affect. We found a significant interaction between infant age and caregiver ABV to threat. Probing this interaction revealed that infants of caregivers with high ABV showed decreases in negative affect over time, while infants of caregivers with low-to-average ABV showed potentiated increases in negative affect. We discuss how both high and extreme patterns of ABV may relate to deviations in developmental trajectories.

Developmental patterns of affective attention across the first 2 years of life.

This study examined patterns of attention toward affective stimuli in a longitudinal sample of typically developing infants (N = 357, 147 females, 50% White, 22% Latinx, 16% African American/Black, 3% Asian, 8% mixed race, 1% not reported) using two eye-tracking tasks that measure vigilance to (rapid detection), engagement with (total looking toward), and disengagement from (latency to looking away) emotional facial configurations. Infants completed each task at 4, 8, 12, 18, and 24 months of age from 2016 to 2020. Multilevel growth models demonstrate that, over the first 2 years of life, infants became faster at detecting and spent more time engaging with angry over neutral faces. These results have implications for our understanding of the development of affect-biased attention.

Do you see what I mean?: Using mobile eye tracking to capture parent-child dynamics in the context of anxiety risk.

Temperamental behavioral inhibition (BI) is a robust endophenotype for anxiety characterized by increased sensitivity to novelty. Controlling parenting can reinforce children's wariness by rewarding signs of distress. Fine-grained, dynamic measures are needed to better understand both how children perceive their parent's behaviors and the mechanisms supporting evident relations between parenting and socioemotional functioning. The current study examined dyadic attractor patterns (average mean durations) with state space grids, using children's attention patterns (captured via mobile eye tracking) and parental behavior (positive reinforcement, teaching, directives, intrusion), as functions of child BI and parent anxiety. Forty 5- to 7-year-old children and their primary caregivers completed a set of challenging puzzles, during which the child wore a head-mounted eye tracker. Child BI was positively correlated with proportion of parent's time spent teaching. Child age was negatively related, and parent anxiety level was positively related, to parent-focused/controlling parenting attractor strength. There was a significant interaction between parent anxiety level and child age predicting parent-focused/controlling parenting attractor strength. This study is a first step to examining the co-occurrence of parenting behavior and child attention in the context of child BI and parental anxiety levels.

Implementation of the diffusion model on dot-probe task performance in children with behavioral inhibition.

Attentional bias to threat, the process of preferentially attending to potentially threatening environmental stimuli over neutral stimuli, is positively associated with behavioral inhibition (BI) and trait anxiety. However, the most used measure of attentional bias to threat, the dot-probe task, has been criticized for demonstrating poor reliability. The present study aimed to assess whether utilizing a sequential sampling model to describe performance could detect adequate test-retest reliability for the dot-probe task, demonstrate stronger cueing effects, and improve the association with neural signals of early attention. One hundred and twenty children aged 9-12 years completed the dot-probe task twice. During the second administration, event-related potentials (ERPs) were obtained as time-sensitive neural markers of attention. BI was not associated with traditional or diffusion model measures of performance. Traditional and diffusion model measures of performance were also not associated with N1, P2, or N2 ERP amplitude. There were main effects of Visit, in which RTs were faster and standard deviation of RT smaller during the second administration due to an increase in drift rate and a decrease in non-decision time. The traditional RT bias score (r = 0.06) and bias scores formed via diffusion model parameters (all r's < 0.40) all demonstrated poor reliability. Results confirm recommendations to move away from using the dot-probe task as the primary or sole index of attentional bias.

The social learning of threat and safety in the family: Parent-to-child transmission of social fears via verbal information.

Parental verbal threat (vs. safety) information regarding the social world may impact a child's fear responses, evident in subjective, behavioral, cognitive, and physiological indices of fear. In this study, primary caregivers provided standardized verbal threat or safety information to their child (N = 68, M = 5.27 years; 34 girls) regarding two strangers in the lab. Following this manipulation, children reported fear beliefs for each stranger. Physiological and behavioral reactions were recorded as children engaged with the two strangers (who were blind to their characterization) in a social interaction task. Child attention to the strangers was measured in a visual search task. Parents also reported their own, and their child's, social anxiety symptoms. Children reported more fear for the stranger paired with threat information, but no significant differences were found in observed child fear, attention, or heart rate. Higher social anxiety symptoms on the side of the parents and the children exacerbated the effect of parental verbal threat on observed fear. Our findings reveal a causal influence of parental verbal threat information only for child-reported fear and highlight the need to further refine the conditions under which acquired fear beliefs persist and generalize to behavior/physiology or get overruled by nonaversive real-life encounters.

Moderating effects of environmental stressors on the development of attention to threat in infancy.

An attention bias to threat has been linked to psychosocial outcomes across development, including anxiety (Pérez-Edgar, K., Bar-Haim, Y., McDermott, J. M., Chronis-Tuscano, A., Pine, D. S., & Fox, N. A. (2010). Attention biases to threat and behavioral inhibition in early childhood shape adolescent social withdrawal. Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 10(3), 349). Although some attention biases to threat are normative, it remains unclear how these biases diverge into maladaptive patterns of emotion processing for some infants. Here, we examined the relation between household stress, maternal anxiety, and attention bias to threat in a longitudinal sample of infants tested at 4, 8, and 12 months. Infants were presented with a passive viewing eye-tracking task in which angry, happy, or neutral facial configurations appeared in one of the four corners of a screen. We measured infants' latency to fixate each target image and collected measures of parental anxiety and daily hassles at each timepoint. Intensity of daily parenting hassles moderated patterns of attention bias to threat in infants over time. Infants exposed to heightened levels of parental hassles became slower to detect angry (but not happy) facial configurations compared with neutral faces between 4 and 12 months of age, regardless of parental anxiety. Our findings highlight the potential impact of the environment on the development of infants' early threat processing and the need to further investigate how early environmental factors shape the development of infant emotion processing.

A computational network perspective on pediatric anxiety symptoms.

BACKGROUND: While taxonomy segregates anxiety symptoms into diagnoses, patients typically present with multiple diagnoses; this poses major challenges, particularly for youth, where mixed presentation is particularly common. Anxiety comorbidity could reflect multivariate, cross-domain interactions insufficiently emphasized in current taxonomy. We utilize network analytic approaches that model these interactions by characterizing pediatric anxiety as involving distinct, inter-connected, symptom domains. Quantifying this network structure could inform views of pediatric anxiety that shape clinical practice and research. METHODS: Participants were 4964 youths (ages 5-17 years) from seven international sites. Participants completed standard symptom inventory assessing severity along distinct domains that follow pediatric anxiety diagnostic categories. We first applied network analytic tools to quantify the anxiety domain network structure. We then examined whether variation in the network structure related to age (3-year longitudinal assessments) and sex, key moderators of pediatric anxiety expression. RESULTS: The anxiety network featured a highly inter-connected structure; all domains correlated positively but to varying degrees. Anxiety patients and healthy youth differed in severity but demonstrated a comparable network structure. We noted specific sex differences in the network structure; longitudinal data indicated additional structural changes during childhood. Generalized-anxiety and panic symptoms consistently emerged as central domains. CONCLUSIONS: Pediatric anxiety manifests along multiple, inter-connected symptom domains. By quantifying cross-domain associations and related moderation effects, the current study might shape views on the diagnosis, treatment, and study of pediatric anxiety.

Individual dynamics of delta-beta coupling: using a multilevel framework to examine inter- and intraindividual differences in relation to social anxiety and behavioral inhibition.

BACKGROUND: Variation in EEG-derived delta-beta coupling has recently emerged as a potential neural marker of emotion regulation, providing a novel and noninvasive method for assessing a risk factor for anxiety. However, our understanding of delta-beta coupling has been limited to group-level comparisons, which provide limited information about an individual's neural dynamics. METHODS: The present study used multilevel modeling to map second-by-second coupling patterns between delta and beta power. Specifically, we examined how inter- and intraindividual delta-beta coupling patterns changed as a function of social anxiety symptoms and temperamental behavioral inhibition (BI). RESULTS: We found that stronger inter- and intraindividual delta-beta coupling were both associated with social anxiety. In contrast, the high-BI group showed weaker coupling relative to the non-BI group, a pattern that did not emerge when analyzing continuous scores of BI. CONCLUSIONS: In characterizing inter- and intraindividual coupling across the sample, we illustrate the utility of examining neural processes across levels of analysis in relation to psychopathology to create multilevel assessments of functioning and risk.

The centrality of temperament to the research domain criteria (RDoC): The earliest building blocks of psychopathology.

The research domain criteria (RDoC) is an innovative approach designed to explore dimensions of human behavior. The aim of this approach is to move beyond the limits of psychiatric categories in the hope of aligning the identification of psychological health and dysfunction with clinical neuroscience. Despite its contributions to adult psychopathology research, RDoC undervalues ontogenetic development, which circumscribes our understanding of the etiologies, trajectories, and maintaining mechanisms of psychopathology risk. In this paper, we argue that integrating temperament research into the RDoC framework will advance our understanding of the mechanistic origins of psychopathology beginning in infancy. In illustrating this approach, we propose the incorporation of core principles of temperament theories into a new "life span considerations" subsection as one option for infusing development into the RDoC matrix. In doing so, researchers and clinicians may ultimately have the tools necessary to support emotional development and reduce a young child's likelihood of psychological dysfunction beginning in the first years of life.

Prenatal substance exposure and maternal hostility from pregnancy to toddlerhood: Associations with temperament profiles at 16 months of age.

We investigated whether infant temperament was predicted by level of and change in maternal hostility, a putative transdiagnostic vulnerability for psychopathology, substance use, and insensitive parenting. A sample of women (N = 247) who were primarily young, low-income, and had varying levels of substance use prenatally (69 nonsmokers, 81 tobacco-only smokers, and 97 tobacco and marijuana smokers) reported their hostility in the third trimester of pregnancy and at 2, 9, and 16 months postpartum, and their toddler's temperament and behavior problems at 16 months. Maternal hostility decreased from late pregnancy to 16 months postpartum. Relative to pregnant women who did not use substances, women who used both marijuana and tobacco prenatally reported higher levels of hostility while pregnant and exhibited less change in hostility over time. Toddlers who were exposed to higher levels of prenatal maternal hostility were more likely to be classified in temperament profiles that resemble either irritability or inhibition, identified via latent profile analysis. These two profiles were each associated with more behavior problems concurrently, though differed in their association with competence. Our results underscore the utility of transdiagnostic vulnerabilities in understanding the intergenerational transmission of psychopathology risk and are discussed in regards to the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework.

Psychometric properties of infant electroencephalography: Developmental stability, reliability, and construct validity of frontal alpha asymmetry and delta-beta coupling.

Resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) provides developmental neuroscientists a noninvasive view into the neural underpinnings of cognition and emotion. Recently, the psychometric properties of two widely used neural measures in early childhood-frontal alpha asymmetry and delta-beta coupling-have come under scrutiny. Despite their growing use, additional work examining how the psychometric properties of these neural signatures may change across infancy is needed. The current study examined the developmental stability, split-half reliability, and construct validity of infant frontal alpha asymmetry and delta-beta coupling. Infants provided resting-state EEG data at 8, 12, and 18 months of age (N = 213). Frontal alpha asymmetry and delta-beta coupling showed significant developmental change from 8 to 18 months. Reliability for alpha asymmetry, and alpha, delta, and beta power, individually, was generally good. In contrast, the reliability of delta-beta coupling scores was poor. Associations between frontal alpha asymmetry and approach tendencies generally emerged, whereas stronger (over-coupled) delta-beta coupling scores were associated with profiles of dysregulation and low inhibition. However, the individual associations varied across time and specific measures of interest. We discuss these findings with a developmental lens, highlighting the importance of repeated measures to better understand links between neural signatures and typical and atypical development.

Pupil responses to dynamic negative facial expressions of emotion in infants and parents.

Observing others' emotions triggers physiological arousal in infants as well as in adults, reflected in dilated pupil sizes. This study is the first to examine parents' and infants' pupil responses to dynamic negative emotional facial expressions. Moreover, the links between pupil responses and negative emotional dispositions were explored among infants and parents. Infants' and one of their parent's pupil responses to negative versus neutral faces were measured via eye tracking in 222 infants (5- to 7-month-olds, n = 77, 11- to 13-month-olds, n = 78, and 17- to 19-month-olds, n = 67) and 229 parents. One parent contributed to the pupil data, whereas both parents were invited to fill in questionnaires on their own and their infant's negative emotional dispositions. Infants did not differentially respond to negative expressions, while parents showed stronger pupil responses to negative versus neutral expressions. There was a positive association between infants' and their parent's mean pupil responses and significant links between mothers' and fathers' stress levels and their infants' pupil responses. We conclude that a direct association between pupil responses in parents and offspring is observable already in infancy in typical development. Stress in parents is related to their infants' pupillary arousal to negative emotions.