Nonetheless, there is a compelling case for the implementation of interventions to reduce the impact of PND on the quality of the mother-infant relationship and improve child outcomes.
Emotion regulation skills develop substantially across adolescence, a period characterized by emotional challenges and developing regulatory neural circuitry. Adolescence is also a risk period for the new onset of anxiety and depressive disorders, psychopathologies which have long been associated with disruptions in regulation of positive and negative emotions. This paper reviews the current understanding of the role of disrupted emotion regulation in adolescent anxiety and depression, describing findings from self-report, behavioral, peripheral psychophysiological, and neural measures. Self-report studies robustly identified associations between emotion dysregulation and adolescent anxiety and depression. Findings from behavioral and psychophysiological studies are mixed, with some suggestion of specific impairments in reappraisal in anxiety. Results from neuroimaging studies broadly implicate altered functioning of amygdala-prefrontal cortical circuitries, although again, findings are mixed regarding specific patterns of altered neural functioning. Future work may benefit from focusing on designs that contrast effects of specific regulatory strategies, and isolate changes in emotional regulation from emotional reactivity. Approaches to improve treatments based on empirical evidence of disrupted emotion regulation in adolescents are also discussed. Future intervention studies might consider training and measurement of specific strategies in adolescents to better understand the role of emotion regulation as a treatment mechanism.
Infant facial features are thought to be powerful elicitors of caregiving
behaviour. It has been widely assumed that men and women respond in different
ways to those features, such as a large forehead and eyes and round protruding
cheeks, colloquially described as ‘cute’. We investigated
experimentally potential differences using measures of both conscious appraisal
(‘liking’) and behavioural responsivity (‘wanting’) to
real world infant and adult faces in 71 non-parents. Overall, women gave
significantly higher ‘liking’ ratings for infant faces (but not
adult faces) compared to men. However, this difference was not seen in the
‘wanting’ task, where we measured the willingness of men and women
to key-press to increase or decrease viewing duration of an infant face. Further
analysis of sensitivity to cuteness, categorising infants by degree of infantile
features, revealed that both men and women showed a graded significant increase
in both positive attractiveness ratings and viewing times to the
‘cutest’ infants. We suggest that infant faces may have similar
motivational salience to men and women, despite gender idiosyncrasies in their
conscious appraisal.
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