Targeting Biomarkers of Risk for Depression and Anxiety through a Parenting Intervention

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 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Depression and anxiety represent urgent public health problems, as these disorders are highly prevalent, chronically impairing for the affected individuals and their families, and very costly to society at large. Impaired functioning of core neural systems involved in reward processing and error monitoring may confer specific risk for depression and anxiety, respectively. In children, a reduced feedback negativity (FN), an ERP component sensitive to monetary rewards versus losses, predicts the first-onset of depressive disorders, whereas an increased error-related negativity (ERN), reflecting over-activation of an error-monitoring system, predicts the first-onset of anxiety disorders. Further, these biomarkers of risk for depression (i.e., FN) and anxiety (i.e., ERN) appear to be influenced by positive parenting and harsh parenting, respectively. The current proposal leverages a well-developed evidence-based parenting intervention to experimentally manipulate positive and harsh parenting in order to examine whether the FN and ERN can be altered in children and assess the specificity of these associations. This mechanism-focused approach has the potential to inform neurobiological models of developmental psychopathology and offer novel targets for intervention.