Parents still matter! Parental warmth predicts adolescent brain function and anxiety and depressive symptoms 2 years later

Abstract Anxiety is the most prevalent psychological disorder among youth, and even following treatment, it confers risk for anxiety relapse and the development of depression. Anxiety disorders are associated with heightened response to negative affective stimuli in the brain networks that underlie emotion processing. One factor that can attenuate the symptoms of anxiety and depression in high-risk youth is parental warmth. The current study investigates whether parental warmth helps to protect against future anxiety and depressive symptoms in adolescents with histories of anxiety and whether neural functioning in the brain regions that are implicated in emotion processing and regulation can account for this link. Following treatment for anxiety disorder (Time 1), 30 adolescents ( M age = 11.58, SD = 1.26) reported on maternal warmth, and 2 years later (Time 2) they participated in a functional neuroimaging task where they listened to prerecorded criticism and neutral statements from a parent. Higher maternal warmth predicted lower neural activation during criticism, compared with the response during neutral statements, in the left amygdala, bilateral insula, subgenual anterior cingulate (sgACC), right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex. Maternal warmth was associated with adolescents’ anxiety and depressive symptoms due to the indirect effects of sgACC activation, suggesting that parenting may attenuate risk for internalizing through its effects on brain function.