Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• James, Kiera M.
• Foster, Claire E.
• Tsypes, Aliona
• Owens, Max
• Gibb, Brandon E.

Titel

Maternal criticism and children’s neural responses to reward and loss

Ist Teil von

• Journal of experimental child psychology, 2021-11, Vol.211, p.105226-105226, Article 105226

Ort / Verlag

United States: Elsevier Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• •Parental criticism is associated with many detrimental child outcomes.•Impact of criticism on youth’s responses to environmental experience is unclear.•Reactivity to gains and losses represent daily experience of reward and punishment.•We found youth of critical mothers display less neural reactivity to gain and loss.•Youth of critical mothers may show maladaptive responses to environmental cues. Parental criticism is linked to a number of detrimental child outcomes. One mechanism by which parental criticism may increase risk for negative outcomes in children is through children’s neural responses to valenced information in the environment. The goal of the current study, therefore, was to examine the relation between maternal criticism and children’s neural responses to monetary gains and losses. To represent daily environmental experiences of reward and punishment, we focused on reactivity to monetary gains versus losses in a guessing task. Participants were 202 children and their mothers recruited from the community. The average age of the children was 9.71 years (SD = 1.38, range = 7–11), with 52.0% of them male and 72.8% Caucasian. Mothers completed the Five Minute Speech Sample to assess expressed emotion–criticism, and of these dyads 51 mothers were rated as highly critical. In addition, children completed a simple guessing game during which electroencephalography was recorded. Children of critical mothers displayed less neural reactivity to both monetary gain and loss than children without critical mothers. Our results were at least partially independent of children’s and mothers’ current levels of internalizing psychopathology. These findings suggest that children exposed to maternal criticism may exhibit disruptions in adaptive responses to environmental experiences regardless of valence. Targeted interventions aimed at reducing expressed emotion–criticism may lead to changes in a child’s reward responsiveness and risk for psychopathology.