Adolescents' emotional competence is associated with parents' neural sensitivity to emotions

30Citations
Citations of this article
114Readers
Mendeley users who have this article in their library.

Abstract

An essential component of youths' successful development is learning to appropriately respond to emotions, including the ability to recognize, identify, and describe one's feelings. Such emotional competence is thought to arise through the parent-child relationship. Yet, the mechanisms by which parents transmit emotional competence to their children are difficult to measure because they are often implicit, idiosyncratic, and not easily articulated by parents or children. In the current study, we used a multifaceted approach that went beyond self-report measures and examined whether parental neural sensitivity to emotions predicted their child's emotional competence. Twenty-two adolescent-parent dyads completed an fMRI scan during which they labeled the emotional expressions of negatively valenced faces. Results indicate that parents who recruited the amygdala, VLPFC, and brain regions involved in mentalizing (i.e., inferring others' emotional states) had adolescent children with greater emotional competence.These results held after controlling for parents' self-reports of emotional expressivity and adolescents' self-reports of the warmth and support of their parent relationships. In addition, adolescents recruited neural regions involved in mentalizing during affect labeling, which significantly mediated the associated between parental neural sensitivity and adolescents' emotional competence, suggesting that youth are modeling or referencing their parents' emotional profiles, thereby contributing to better emotional competence. © 2014 Telzer, Qu, Goldenberg, Fuligni, Galván and Lieberman.

References Powered by Scopus

Asymptotic and resampling strategies for assessing and comparing indirect effects in multiple mediator models

25095Citations
N/AReaders
Get full text

The twenty-item Toronto Alexithymia scale-I. Item selection and cross-validation of the factor structure

4149Citations
N/AReaders
Get full text

Meeting of minds: The medial frontal cortex and social cognition

3070Citations
N/AReaders
Get full text

Cited by Powered by Scopus

Gender differences in large-scale and small-scale spatial ability: A systematic review based on behavioral and neuroimaging research

76Citations
N/AReaders
Get full text

The Protective Effects of Supportive Parenting on the Relationship Between Adolescent Poverty and Resting-State Functional Brain Connectivity During Adulthood

56Citations
N/AReaders
Get full text

Families that fire together smile together: Resting state connectome similarity and daily emotional synchrony in parent-child dyads

56Citations
N/AReaders
Get full text

Register to see more suggestions

Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.

Already have an account?

Cite

CITATION STYLE

APA

Telzer, E. H., Qu, Y., Goldenberg, D., Fuligni, A. J., Galván, A., & Lieberman, M. D. (2014). Adolescents’ emotional competence is associated with parents’ neural sensitivity to emotions. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8(JULY). https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00558

Readers' Seniority

Tooltip

PhD / Post grad / Masters / Doc 57

79%

Lecturer / Post doc 7

10%

Researcher 5

7%

Professor / Associate Prof. 3

4%

Readers' Discipline

Tooltip

Psychology 61

78%

Neuroscience 6

8%

Social Sciences 6

8%

Medicine and Dentistry 5

6%

Article Metrics

Tooltip
Mentions
Blog Mentions: 1
Social Media
Shares, Likes & Comments: 9

Save time finding and organizing research with Mendeley

Sign up for free