Examining the unique contribution of parental anxiety sensitivity on adolescent neural responses during an emotion regulation task

Abstract

Anxiety sensitivity and emotion dysregulation are transdiagnostic risk factors for anxiety pathology. Theoretical and empirical work also highlight the influence of parents on their adolescent’s capacity for emotion regulation. We tested whether parental anxiety sensitivity uniquely moderated brain activation during emotion regulation in their adolescents. One hundred and forty-seven adolescents (M/SDage= 12.07/.90; 50.3% female) and their parents (99.3% mothers) completed a measure of anxiety sensitivity. Adolescents completed an fMRI emotion regulation task that required youth to either regulate or react (regulation factor) to negative or neutral stimuli (valence factor). Analyses examined whether parental anxiety sensitivity moderated adolescent neural activation related to regulation demands and stimuli valence. Importantly, child anxiety sensitivity was included as a covariate, such that the findings reflect only the unique associations with parental anxiety sensitivity. Results revealed that parental anxiety sensitivity moderated neural responses to regulatory demands in several brain regions. Further exploration of the findings revealed that parental anxiety sensitivity was associated with greater activation in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), anterior cingulate cortex, and middle frontal gyrus (MFG) during react trials (p’s = .003-.02) and with decreased activation in a different region of right IFG/MFG during regulate trials (p = .048). Results suggest that parental anxiety sensitivity impacts their children’s emotion regulation at a neurobiological level. Together, our results provide novel insight into the impact of parental anxiety sensitivity on their child’s emotion regulation-related brain activation, over and above adolescent anxiety sensitivity.