Parental emotionality is related to preschool children’s neural responses to emotional faces

Abstract

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.