Does anxiety impact the neural processing of child faces in mothers of school-aged children? An ERP study using an emotional Go/NoGo task

ABSTRACT

Maternal anxiety during pregnancy and the early postpartum period is associated with heightened neural processing of neutral infant faces as measured by event-related potentials (ERPs). However, less is known about how anxiety shapes neural face processing in mothers of older children. In our study, 36 mothers of 8–10 year old children completed a Go/NoGo task consisting of neutral and emotional (happy, fearful) facial expressions posed by unfamiliar school-aged children while EEG was recorded. Higher levels of maternal anxiety -indexed via self-report- were associated with delayed behavioral responses to children’s fearful faces and increased N170 and LPP amplitudes elicited by children’s neutral faces. While anxiety was also positively related to the LPP elicited by children’s emotional faces, it only led to increased N170 amplitude responses to children’s fearful, but not happy, faces and only when they were NoGo cues. The study replicates and extends prior findings examining the impact of maternal anxiety on neural responses to neutral infant faces to later stages of parenting with further neural markers and emotional expressions being affected. Findings evidence the importance of studying these associations beyond infancy to increase our knowledge about processes potentially underlying the relation between anxiety and less optimal parenting across development.

KEYWORDS:

• Maternal anxiety
• EEG/ERP
• emotional faces
• Go/NoGo task
• N170
• LPP

Acknowledgments

We thank our students Julian Kahler and Anusche Macht for assistance with data collection. We further want to acknowledge the support of Anna Eichler, Vera Zalan and Clara Ziegler in recruiting our maternal sample. Finally, we thank all participating mothers for their time and willingness to contribute to research in the field.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflict of interest.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Please see Supplementary Materials for additional analyses examining neutral and emotional child faces within the same analysis.