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In newly published research, 91���� doctoral student Elana Israel, MS ’22, explores which depressive symptoms largely affect children’s neural responses to feedback.

Depression in parents can affect a child’s reward processing, or how their brains react to positive and negative feedback. Israel and Psychology Professor Brandon Gibb, director of the Mood Disorders Institute, explored whether a specific symptom of depression in parents known as anhedonia, a loss of interest or pleasure in things, may be specifically responsible for this link.

“We know that children who have a parent with a history of depression are more likely to develop depression themselves than children of parents who don’t have a history of depression,” Israel said. “Something we look at in our lab are the neurobiological factors that might help to explain this risk.”

With this study, Israel and Gibb sought to further previous research that examined the link between depression in parents and children’s reward outcome processing. This study looked at parents’ anhedonic symptoms compared to parents’ other, non-anhedonic symptoms of depression to see how they relate to children’s neural responses to positive and negative feedback

“The idea is that if you have this risk factor of being less interested or less engaged or finding things less enjoyable, maybe that’s reflected in how your brain responds to environmental feedback,” Israel said. “Children of parents who have higher levels of anhedonic depressive symptoms should show a reduced response while other depressive symptoms theoretically should not be as related to this specific brain response.”

To test their hypothesis, Israel and Gibb conducted a reward processing experiment.

They had families of all different backgrounds come into the lab, with more than 200 parents and children ages 7 to 11 completing the study. Parents filled out questionnaires that were used to assess their specific symptoms, while children completed a task during which an electroencephalogram (EEG) measured their brain activity.

In the task, children saw two doors and were asked to guess the one with a prize behind it. If they chose the correct door, they won money, but if they chose the wrong door, they lost money. The researchers found that higher anhedonic depressive symptoms in parents were related to a decreased neural response to winning and losing money in children, whereas more general depressive symptoms in parents weren’t related to children’s neural responses to feedback.

“What that tells us is that there is something specific about parents’ anhedonia that may impact children’s neural responses,” Israel said. “It further specifies a group of children who might be at heightened risk for loss of interest or pleasure and lack of engagement, which is a core feature of depression.”

“If parents are experiencing forms of depression where they’re not enjoying things and aren’t interested in things, that seems to be impacting how their kids are responding to what’s going on around them,” Gibb added. “They’re less reactive to positive things and negative things. It seems that parents’ experiences of anhedonia is the key feature of depression impacting how children’s brains are responding, at least in our study, rather than other common symptoms of depression.”

Gibb said it’s important for future research to consider how family dynamics change when parents with anhedonic symptoms start to feel better. As children develop, a key factor to examine is how situations may change over time throughout their most critical and sensitive years.

The researchers also noted the importance of understanding reactions to positive and negative feedback beyond monetary gain and loss. As children grow into their adolescent and teenage developmental years, social feedback becomes increasingly important.

With this research, Israel hopes to expand the ability to determine which children are at increased risk of developing psychopathology. With additional research, more families and children could get the help they need.

“There are researchers looking at interventions that are designed to increase positive mood, positive engagement and positive parent-child relationships,” she said. “It will be important to see if these findings can identify families who might be most likely to benefit from those types of interventions.”