Children's affect expression and frontal EEG asymmetry: transactional associations with mothers' depressive symptoms

Abstract

Although parents and children are thought to influence one another's affect and behavior, few studies have examined the direction of effects from children to parents, particularly with respect to parental psychopathology. We tested the hypothesis that children's affective characteristics are associated with the course of mothers' depressive symptoms. Children's affect expression was observed during a series of mother-child interaction tasks, and children's resting frontal electroencephalogram (EEG) asymmetry was assessed in a psychophysiology laboratory. Mothers' depressive symptoms were assessed at two time points, approximately one year apart, at the mother-child interaction visits. Depressive symptoms increased over time for mothers with a history of childhood-onset depression whose children exhibited right frontal EEG asymmetry. Depressive symptoms were associated with high child negative affect at both time points for mothers whose children exhibited right frontal EEG asymmetry. Cross-lagged models with a subset of participants provided some evidence of both parent-to-child and child-to-parent directions of effects. Findings suggest that akin to other interpersonal stressors, children's affective characteristics may contribute to maternal depressive symptoms.

Fig. 1

Illustrations of three-way interactions for the influence of child affective characteristics on mothers’ depressive symptoms. The time X group X frontal asymmetry (a) and time X affect expression X frontal asymmetry (b) interactions are depicted. Groups for affect expression and frontal asymmetry were created by selecting cases that were at least 1 SD below or above the sample mean. At high levels, the affect expression variable reflects high positive affect, high sociability, high appropriate affect, low negative affect, and low negative affect toward mother. COD Maternal history of childhood-onset depression. Left frontal Greater relative left frontal brain activity in child; right frontal Greater relative right frontal brain activity in child

Fig. 2

Illustration of regions of significance and confidence bands for the time X COD group X frontal asymmetry (a) and time X affect expression X frontal asymmetry (b) interactions. In both graphs, frontal EEG asymmetry is considered the moderator variable (depicted on x-axis), and the regression of maternal depressive symptoms on a maternal COD group or b child affect expression is plotted as a simple slope. Dotted lines indicate regions of significance: Values above the upper limit and below the lower limit are values of frontal EEG asymmetry for which the relation between maternal depressive symptoms and the focal predictor (either COD group or child affect expression) is considered significant. Confidence bands are continuously plotted confidence intervals for the relation of maternal depressive symptoms and the focal predictor at values of frontal EEG asymmetry. COD Maternal history of childhood-onset depression

Fig. 3

Example of a cross-lagged model for the relation between a child affective characteristic and maternal depressive symptoms at time 1 (T1) and time 2 (T2). Path a reflects child effects on mother, and path b reflects mother effects on child. In the actual analyses, two separate models were estimated. Both models contained the same maternal variables. In one model child frontal EEG asymmetry was included, and in the other child affect expression was included