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Updated: Jul 7, 2025

Psychophysiological Assessment of the Effectiveness of Emotion Regulation Strategies in Childhood
Published on: February 11, 2017
Parental emotionality is related to preschool children's neural responses to emotional faces
Ruohan Xia1,2, Megan J Heise3, Lindsay C Bowman1,2
1Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, 1 Shields Ave, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
Abstract:
The ability to accurately decode others' facial expressions is essential for successful social interaction. Previous theories suggest that aspects of parental emotionality-the frequency, persistence and intensity of parents' own emotions-can influence children's emotion perception. Through a combination of mechanisms, parental emotionality may shape how children's brains specialize to respond to emotional expressions, but empirical data are lacking. The present study provides a direct empirical test of the relation between the intensity, persistence and frequency of parents' own emotions and children's neural responses to perceiving emotional expressions. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded as typically developing 3- to 5-year-old children (final Ns = 59 and 50) passively viewed faces expressing different emotional valences (happy, angry and fearful) at full and reduced intensity (100% intense expression and 40% intense expression). We examined relations between parental emotionality and children's mean amplitude ERP N170 and negative central responses. The findings demonstrate a clear relation between parental emotionality and children's neural responses (in the N170 mean amplitude and latency) to emotional expressions and suggest that parents may influence children's emotion-processing neural circuitry.
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