Associations between childhood irritability and neural reactivity to maternal feedback in adolescence

Abstract

Early irritability, a transdiagnostic vulnerability for psychopathology, is associated with alterations in neural reactivity to emotional stimuli and reward; however, associations between childhood irritability and neural markers of risk may be mitigated by the quality of caregiving youth receive. We examined longitudinal relationships between irritability in childhood and young adolescents' neural activity of regions typically associated with emotion regulation and reward processing during processing of maternal feedback and tested whether these associations were moderated by youth's perceptions of the parent-child relationship quality. Eighty-one adolescents (M_age = 11.1 years) listened to maternal critical and praising feedback while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Age 3 irritability, assessed observationally, was negatively associated with age 11 neural reactivity to maternal criticism in a cluster in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), particularly for youths who reported more positive maternal parenting. Given the role of the dlPFC activation in the effortful processing of emotional stimuli, decreased activation may reflect disengagement from negatively valenced interpersonal feedback in the context of a positive caregiving environment, thereby mitigating psychopathology risk associated with irritability.

Keywords: Adolescence; FMRI; Irritability; Maternal feedback; Parenting.