Empathy for others versus for one's child: Associations with mothers' brain activation during a social cognitive task and with their toddlers' functioning.

Caregivers who are higher in dispositional empathy tend to have children with better developmental outcomes; however, few studies have considered the role of child-directed (i.e., "parental") empathy, which may be relevant for the caregiver-child relationship. We hypothesized that mothers' parental empathy during their child's infancy will be a stronger predictor of their child's social-emotional functioning as a toddler than will mothers' dispositional empathy. We further explored whether parental and dispositional empathy have shared or distinct patterns of neural activation during a social-cognitive movie-watching task. In 118 mother-infant dyads, greater parental empathy assessed when infants were 6 months old was associated with more social-emotional competencies and fewer problems in the children 1 year later, even after adjusting for dispositional empathy. In contrast, dispositional empathy was not associated with child functioning when controlling for parental empathy. In a subset of 20 mothers, insula activation was positively associated with specific facets of both dispositional and parental empathy, whereas right temporoparietal junction activation was associated only with parental empathy. Thus, dispositional and parental empathy appear to be dissociable by both brain and behavioral metrics. Parental empathy may be a viable target for interventions, especially for toddlers at risk for developing social-emotional difficulties.

The structure of depressive symptoms and characteristics and their relation to overall severity in major depressive disorder.

Although many investigators have examined symptoms of major depressive disorder (MDD), the multivariate relations among these features of depression and their relative associations with overall severity of depression are not well understood. The present study is the first to examine the underlying factor structure of depression across a broad set of constructs and to model the multivariate association of these factors with the overall severity of depression. We conducted a large-scale factor analysis and multiple regression in a sample of participants diagnosed with MDD (N = 233) and healthy controls (N = 235). We obtained a five-factor solution composed of the following factors: (1) anxiety; (2) behavioral activation; (3) core symptoms; (4) rumination; and (5) emotional intensity. The core symptoms factor, composed primarily of DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for MDD, was the only factor that showed a consistent, significant association with overall severity of depression and functional impairment. Rumination combined with behavioral inhibition and positive and negative affect combined with each other to form coherent constructs that may be useful in examining differences among depressed individuals. These findings provide an important data-driven framework for the multidimensional symptom structure of depression and suggest several actionable ways for improving clinical assessment and treatment for individuals with MDD.

Resting-state functional connectivity and inflexibility of daily emotions in major depression.

BACKGROUND: Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is characterized by aberrant resting-state functional connectivity (FC) in anterior cingulate regions (e.g., subgenual anterior cingulate [sgACC]) and by negative emotional functioning that is inflexible or resistant to change. METHODS: MDD (N = 33) and control (CTL; N = 31) adults completed a resting-state scan, followed by a smartphone-based Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM) protocol surveying 10 positive and negative emotions 5 times per day for 21 days. We used multilevel modeling to assess moment-to-moment emotional inflexibility (i.e., strong temporal connections between emotions). We examined group differences in whole-brain FC analysis of bilateral sgACC, and then examined associations between emotional experiences and the extracted FC values within each group. RESULTS: As predicted, MDDs had inflexibility in sadness and avoidance (p < .001, FDR-corrected p < .05), indicating that these emotional experiences persist in depression. MDDs showed weaker FC between the right sgACC and pregenual/dorsal anterior cingulate (pg/dACC) than did CTLs (FWE-corrected, voxelwise p = .01). Importantly, sgACC-pg/dACC FC predicted sadness inflexibility in both MDDs (p = .046) and CTLs (p = .033), suggesting that sgACC FC is associated with day-to-day negative emotions. LIMITATIONS: Other maladaptive behaviors likely also affect the flexibility of negative emotions. We cannot generalize our finding of a positive relation between sgACC FC and inflexibility of sadness to individuals with more chronic depression or who have recovered from depression. CONCLUSIONS: Our preliminary findings suggest that connections between portions of the ACC contribute to the persistence of negative emotions and are important in identifying a brain mechanism that may underlie the maintenance of sadness in daily life.