Maternal buffering of fear-potentiated startle in children and adolescents with trauma exposure

ABSTRACT

Parental availability influences fear expression and learning across species, but the effect of maternal buffering on fear learning in humans is unknown. Here we investigated the effect of maternal availability during fear conditioning in a group of children (ages 8–10) and adolescents (ages 11–13) from a low-income population with a range of trauma exposure. Acoustic startle response data were collected to measure fear-potentiated startle (FPS) in 104 participants. A total of 62 participants were tested with the mother available and 42 when the mother was not in the testing room. We observed that maternal availability during fear conditioning interacted with age to affect FPS discrimination between CS+ and CS–. In line with previous findings suggesting an absence of maternal buffering in adolescents, fear discrimination was affected by maternal availability only in children. Second, we observed that the effect of maternal buffering on FPS discrimination in children was not influenced by maternally reported warmth. In conclusion, we demonstrated that maternal availability improved discrimination in children, regardless of the quality of the relationship. Adolescents discriminated irrespective of maternal status, suggesting that childhood may be a sensitive period for environmental influences on key processes such as learning of danger and safety signals.

KEYWORDS:

• Fear conditioning
• fear-potentiated startle
• maternal buffering
• maternal warmth
• trauma exposure

Acknowledgements

We thank Allen Graham, Angelo Brown, and the Grady Trauma Project staff for their assistance with participant recruitment and data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The conference that occasioned this special issue was supported by NSF grant BCS-1439258. This work was supported by National Institute of Health Grants MH100122 (PI, T.J.) and HD071982 (PI, B.B.), the Emory Medical Care Foundation, the Atlanta Clinical Translational Science Institute, the NIH National Centers for Research Resources (M01 RR00039). This work was funded in part by the Brain and Behavior Foundation (formerly NARSAD; T.J.).