Emerging biomarkers for child & family intervention studies: A review of EEG studies of parenting.

Most interventions for childhood mental health problems require significant parental involvement, and treatment programs are increasingly incorporating components aimed at enhancing parents' own self-regulation in the context of potentially stressful parent-child interactions. This paper discusses the promise of EEG in examining the rapidly unfolding perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and regulatory processes that occur in parenting, in hopes of ultimately informing child and family interventions. First, we review two separate bodies of work that have used EEG with parents: one examining event-related potential (ERP) measures, and the other examining frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA). We discuss benefits of each within the study of parenting, and also suggest other EEG metrics (such as event-related time-frequency analyses) that can be leveraged to fill current gaps in our knowledge. Finally, we discuss the potential for these findings to inform clinical work with children and families, such as identifying biomarkers that could aid in assessment, treatment recommendations, and monitoring response to interventions.