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Maternal Antecedents to Adolescent Girls’ Neural Regulation of Emotion
Author(s) -
Modi Haina H.,
Davis Megan M.,
Miernicki Michelle E.,
Telzer Eva H.,
Rudolph Karen D.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of research on adolescence
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.342
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1532-7795
pISSN - 1050-8392
DOI - 10.1111/jora.12545
Subject(s) - psychology , amygdala , developmental psychology , emotional regulation , prefrontal cortex , negative emotion , emotional development , cognition , social change , neuroscience , economics , economic growth
The purpose of this study was to investigate contributions of maternal emotional resources to individual differences in adolescents’ functional connectivity during emotion regulation. Participants included 35 adolescent girls who completed an implicit emotion regulation task during fMRI. Mothers reported on the quality of their adult attachment and emotional awareness when youth were in elementary school. Higher anxious attachment and lower emotional awareness were significantly correlated with more positive amygdala–right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex connectivity, a pattern linked in prior research with ineffective emotion regulation and emotional difficulties. Further, there was an indirect effect of anxious attachment on adolescent connectivity through emotional awareness. These results suggest that compromised maternal emotional resources in childhood may be linked to atypical neural processing of emotions.