Parental Warmth and Emotion Reactivity in the Brain: Differences by Assigned Sex

Emotional reactivity and emotion regulation play key roles in adolescent mental health. Positive parenting behavior has been shown to facilitate positive adolescent emotional development; however, relationships between parenting and adolescent neural emotion reactivity have not been thoroughly examined. The present study employed whole-brain analysis of fMRI data to examine associations between observed parental warmth (one type of positive parenting) and adolescent neural reactivity to negative and positive emotional stimuli among a suburban, mostly upper middle-class (53% birth-assigned girls, Mage = 12.73) sample. Given previous evidence that relationships between parenting processes and adolescent neural emotion reactivity vary by youth's assigned sex, interactions between parental warmth and assigned sex were also examined. A main effect was found in which lower parental warmth was linked to blunted neural reactivity to negative emotional stimuli in the vACC, an emotion-processing region. Further, there was a significant interaction by assigned sex, such that lower parental warmth was linked to blunted negative emotion-related neural reactivity was more so for assigned boys than assigned girls in the emotion processing, executive functioning, and sensory processing regions. Findings suggest that in parenting environments with low warmth, youth, and especially assigned boys, may be more prone to blunted neural emotion reactivity. This research suggests the importance of parental warmth in youth emotional development and negative emotion-related neural reactivity.