Parental neural responses to threat impact children's test anxiety

Test anxiety impacts students' academic and psychological well-being, influenced not just by their own threat processing but also by their parents' threat processing. This study aims to explore the association between parents' threat processing and children's test anxiety. The study initially recruited 53 parent-child dyads, and 45 dyads (N = 90) remained after data screening, comprising 20 children with high test anxiety (Mean _age = 10.44 years) and their parents (Mean _age = 38.75 years), and 25 children with low test anxiety (Mean _age = 11.13 years) and their parents (Mean _age = 38.36 years). All participants completed the emotional Stroop task and had their event-related potentials recorded when processing test-related and non-test-related threatening words, using the interference effects of the N2 and N450 as indicators of threat processing. Results showed that only under non-test-related threatening conditions did parents' N2 and N450 interference effects negatively relate to children's test anxiety levels, s suggesting that parents' neural responses to general threat cues may play a role in shaping children's anxiety and informing family-based interventions.