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Research Article

Maternal socioeconomic disadvantage, neural function during volitional emotion regulation, and parenting

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Pages 276-292 | Received 15 Nov 2018, Published online: 07 Jun 2022
 

ABSTRACT

The transition to becoming a mother involves numerous emotional challenges, and the ability to effectively keep negative emotions in check is critical for parenting. Evidence suggests that experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage interferes with parenting adaptations and alters neural processes related to emotion regulation. The present study examined whether socioeconomic disadvantage is associated with diminished neural activation while mothers engaged in volitional (i.e., purposeful) emotion regulation. 59 mothers, at an average of 4 months postpartum, underwent fMRI scanning and completed the Emotion Regulation Task (ERT). When asked to regulate emotions using reappraisal (i.e., Reappraise condition; reframing stimuli in order to decrease negative emotion), mothers with lower income-to-needs ratio exhibited dampened neural activation in the dorsolateral and ventrolateral PFC, middle frontal and middle temporal gyrus, and caudate. Without explicit instructions to down-regulate (i.e., Maintain condition), mothers experiencing lower income also exhibited dampened response in regulatory areas, including the middle frontal and middle temporal gyrus and caudate. Blunted middle frontal gyrus activation across both Reappraise and Maintain conditions was associated with reduced maternal sensitivity during a mother-child interaction task. Results of the present study demonstrate the influence of socioeconomic disadvantage on prefrontal engagement during emotion regulation, which may have downstream consequences for maternal behaviors.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [R01HD090068; R21HD078797; R21DA046556], the Professional Research Opportunity for Faculty (PROF) and Faculty Research Fund (FRF), University of Denver; the Victoria S. Levin Award For Early Career Success in Young Children’s Mental Health Research, Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD); and the NARSAD Independent Investigator Grant. The authors thank the families who participated in the study and individuals who supported recruitment. The authors also wish to acknowledge Amy Anderson, Lindsay Blanton, Christina Congleton, Tanisha Crosby-Attipoe, Alexander Dufford, Andrew Erhart, Victoria Everts, Rachel Gray, Claire Jeske, Laura Jeske, Daniel Mason, Rebekah Tribble, and Nanxi Xu for their research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17470919.2022.2082521

Notes

1 Of 59 participants who were included in the analysis, 39 participants overlap with (Kim et al., Citation2020), 35 overlap with Kim et al. (Citation2017), p. 26 overlap with Kim et al. (Citation2016), p. 49 overlap with Olsavsky et al. (Citation2019) and 46 overlap with Dufford et al. (Citation2019), all of which used different tasks other than the ERT or performed a resting state functional connectivity analysis.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [R01HD090068,R21HD078797,R21DA046556].

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