Department of Psychology, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.
Dev Neuropsychol. 2023 Aug 18;48(6):299-313. doi: 10.1080/87565641.2023.2254872. Epub 2023 Sep 4.
Parent-youth relationships and parenting are critically important to adolescents' development. The present study examined associations between parenting behaviors (which included observed parent emotion expression and negative and positive parenting behaviors during a parent-adolescent interaction) and adolescent brain structure, and sex differences in associations, in 66 12-14 year-olds. The study found that 1) among all adolescents in the sample, greater parent negative emotion expression in parent-youth interactions was associated with greater adolescent gray matter volume (GMV) in the left hippocampus, 2) parent positive emotion expression was not associated with adolescent GMV, 3) several associations differed by sex. These findings suggest that parenting is important for adolescent brain structure and future work should consider this by sex.
亲子关系和育儿对青少年的发展至关重要。本研究调查了亲子互动中观察到的父母情绪表达以及父母的消极和积极行为与青少年大脑结构之间的关系,以及这些关系的性别差异,共涉及 66 名 12-14 岁的青少年。研究发现:1)在样本中的所有青少年中,亲子互动中父母的消极情绪表达越多,青少年左海马体的灰质体积(GMV)越大;2)父母积极的情绪表达与青少年 GMV 无关;3)有几个关联存在性别差异。这些发现表明,育儿对青少年的大脑结构很重要,未来的研究应该考虑到这一点。