Atypical Child-Parent Neural Synchrony Links to Children’s Psychopathological Symptoms

Abstract

Negative family environment can be harmful for a child's psychological wellbeing through suboptimal child-parent interactions. The medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) is implicated in socioemotional cognition, but how interactions between child and parent brains within this region contribute to children's psychological wellbeing remains unknown. Across two studies examining 395 child-parent dyads (child Mage = 9.35, SD = 6.28 - 12.51), results showed that children from negative family environment experienced more internalizing symptoms. Dyad-based analyses of movie-watching functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data revealed that children had higher inter-subject correlations in dorsal- and ventral-MPFC with parents than stranger controls, and increased concordance of activity with regions critical for socioemotional skills. Negative family environment reduced inter-subject connectivity of the ventral-MPFC with the hippocampus in child-parent dyads, which further mediated children's internalizing symptoms. The ventral-MPFC and hippocampus exhibited reciprocal activity concordance in child-parent dyads. Our findings suggest child-parent brain-to-brain concordance as a neurobiological mechanism of how family environment affects psychological wellbeing.