Observed Parenting and Adolescent Brain Structure

ABSTRACT

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.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

For this study, we have a data sharing plan with our funding source. Because much of this dataset is sensitive in nature or unable to be reduced to an easily sharable format like excel (e.g., whole‐brain data), our protocol is to have people interested in the data to e-mail us directly and describe the analyses they plan to conduct and we will send them the appropriate data.

Ethics and consent

Written consent and assent were obtained by parent and child participants in our study and were approved by The Institutional Review Board (IRB) at George Mason University. Our methods were consistent with our IRB as well as the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health R01‐DA033431 (PI: Second Author), R34DA034823 (PI: Second Author), by the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation through NIH Grant UL1TR000142, and open access fees were supported through George Mason University Libraries Open Access Publishing Fund.