Department of Psychology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, 11794-2500, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Maryland-College Park, College Park, USA.
J Abnorm Child Psychol. 2017 Nov;45(8):1599-1608. doi: 10.1007/s10802-017-0272-y.
Research on emotion-processing biases in offspring of depressed parents has produced a variety of findings. Child persistent irritability may be a useful clinical feature that demarcates subgroups of offspring with distinct patterns of emotion processing. The present study examined whether early persistent irritability moderated the relationship between maternal lifetime history of a depressive disorder and appetitive- and aversive-emotion processing in 338 never-depressed pre-adolescent children (43.8% female). When children were 3, mothers were interviewed about children's persistent irritability. Six years later, EEG was recorded while children completed a task in which the late positive potential (LPP), a neural index of emotional reactivity, was measured in response to appetitive, aversive, and neutral images. At both assessments, mothers were interviewed about their own psychopathology. Among offspring of depressed mothers, children characterized by high levels of early persistent irritability showed an enhanced LPP to appetitive and aversive compared to neutral images (i.e., ΔLPP), whereas children with low levels of early irritability showed attenuated ΔLPPs. In offspring of mothers with no history of depression, there was no association between irritability and emotion processing. Findings suggest that persistent irritability influences the pattern of emotion-processing aberrations in offspring of depressed mothers.
对抑郁父母子女的情绪处理偏差的研究产生了各种发现。儿童持续的烦躁可能是一种有用的临床特征，可以区分具有不同情绪处理模式的子女亚组。本研究探讨了在 338 名从未抑郁的青春期前儿童（43.8%为女性）中，早期持续烦躁是否调节了母亲一生中抑郁障碍史与情绪处理中的趋避性之间的关系。当孩子 3 岁时，母亲接受了有关孩子持续烦躁的访谈。六年后，当孩子完成一项任务时，记录了脑电图，该任务测量了对趋性、厌恶和中性图像的晚正电位（LPP），这是情绪反应的神经指标。在这两个评估中，母亲都接受了关于自己精神病理学的访谈。在抑郁母亲的子女中，具有较高水平的早期持续烦躁的儿童对趋性和厌恶性图像的 LPP 增强（即ΔLPP），而早期烦躁水平较低的儿童的ΔLPP 则减弱。在母亲没有抑郁史的子女中，烦躁与情绪处理之间没有关联。研究结果表明，持续烦躁会影响抑郁母亲子女的情绪处理异常模式。
