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Review
. 2022:54:341-372.
doi: 10.1007/7854_2021_276.

Effects of Parenting Environment on Child and Adolescent Social-Emotional Brain Function

Tara M Chaplin  1 , Kelsey L Mauro  2 , Claire E Niehaus  2
Affiliations
Review

Effects of Parenting Environment on Child and Adolescent Social-Emotional Brain Function

Tara M Chaplin et al. Curr Top Behav Neurosci. 2022.

Abstract

The caregiving environment that children and adolescents experience is critically important for their social-emotional development. Parenting may affect child social-emotional outcomes through its effects in shaping the child's developing brain. Research has begun to investigate effects of parenting on child and adolescent brain function in humans using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Here we review these initial studies. These studies find associations between parenting behavior and child and adolescent functional activation in neural networks involved in emotional arousal, emotion regulation (ER), reward processing, cognitive control, and social-emotional information processing. Findings from these studies suggest that higher negative parenting and lower positive parenting are generally associated with heightened activation in emotional arousal networks in response to negative emotional stimuli in youth. Further, findings indicate that lower positive parenting is associated with higher response in reward processing networks to monetary reward in youth. Finally, findings show that lower positive parenting predicts lower activation in cognitive control networks during cognitive control tasks and less adaptive neural responses to parent-specific stimuli. Several studies found these associations to be moderated by child sex or psychopathology risk status and we discuss these moderating factors and discuss implications of findings for children's social-emotional development.

Keywords: Adolescence; Emotion; Emotion regulation; Neural function; Parenting; Reward; fMRI.

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Conflict of interest statement

Disclosures and Declarations

Conflicts of Interest: The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Summary of findings on parenting and youth neural responses. aPsych Risk indicates presence of risk for psychological symptoms, including parenting psychopathology or temperament. Emo Emotion, Amy Amygdala, sgACC subgenual Anterior Cingulate Cortex, pACC perigenual Anterior Cingulate Cortex, Reg Regulation, vlPFC ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex, esp especially, NAc Nucleus Accumbens, mPFC medial Prefrontal Cortex, dlPFC dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex, hi high, TPJ Temporoparietal Junction, IPL Inferior Parietal Lobule, PCC Posterior Cingulate Cortex, SFG Superior Frontal Gyrus
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