The Impact of Parental Behaviors on the Experience of Stress in Adolescent Offspring of Depressed Parents.

Adolescent Depression;HPA-Axis;Social Support;Psychology;Social Sciences;Psychology

Geiss, Elisa Gabrielle PriceOlson, Sheryl L ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Adolescent Depression;    HPA-Axis;    Social Support;    Psychology;    Social Sciences;    Psychology;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/133181/egprice_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Adolescents who have a parent with a history of depression are at increased risk for depression.The intergenerational transmission of risk may be due, at least in part, to deficits in stress regulation related to ineffective parent-child regulatory processes.While parents play a key role in facilitating children’s emotion regulation, it is currently unknown how parents with a history of depression impact their adolescent’s stress regulation.The current study aims to characterize the nature of supportive behaviors that parents give to their adolescents, and examine how this may influence the adolescent’s emotional and neuroendocrine stress regulation to a laboratory stressor.63 adolescents aged 12-16 years (41 at high and 22 at low familial risk) participated in a socially evaluated speech task and were randomized into having their parents with them or being alone for 10 minutes after the task.Observed parental supportive and unsupportive behaviors were coded.Subjective and objective measures of stress were obtained through adolescent’s report of their emotional distress, and by collecting salivary cortisol to index neuroendocrine stress reactivity.Adolescents reported decreases in happiness, increases in negative affect, and showed increases in cortisol during the stress task. In response to this distress, parents provided supportive behaviors to their adolescent, yet there was less support given by parents with a history of depression.When adolescents had more depressive symptoms, parents without depression provided greater support, whereas parents with a history of depression provided greater unsupportive behaviors.Greater support related to faster up-regulation of positive affect after the stress task, yet the influence on cortisol was dependent upon risk status.Higher parental support was associated with lower peak cortisol in high risk adolescents, and higher peak cortisol in adolescents at low familial risk.Although this link was surprising, greater support in the context of high cortisol levels may reflect sensitivity of non-affected parents to the child’s distress.Overall, while adolescents at high familial risk for depression do not receive as much supportive emotion socialization in response to stressors, higher levels of parental support aids in stress regulation and may be protective against future depression.