Parental Emotionality is Related to Preschool Children’s Neural Responses to Emotional Faces

The ability to accurately decode others’ facial expressions is essential for successful social interaction. Previous theories suggest that aspects of parental emotionality—the frequency, persistence, and intensity of parents’ own emotions—can influence children’s emotion perception. Through a combination of mechanisms, parental emotionality may shape how children’s brains specialize to respond to emotional expressions, but empirical data is lacking. The present study provides a direct empirical test of the relation between the intensity, persistence, and frequency of parents’ own emotions and children’s neural responses to perceiving emotional expressions. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded as typically developing 3 to 5-year-old children (final Ns = 59 and 50) passively viewed faces expressing different emotional valences (happy, angry, fearful) at full and reduced intensity (100% intense expression, 40% intense expression). We examined relations between parental emotionality (as self-reported on the Nock et al., 2008 Emotion Reactivity Scale) and children’s mean amplitude ERP N170 and Nc responses. Findings demonstrate a clear relation between parental emotionality and children’s neural responses (in the N170 mean amplitude and latency) to emotional expressions and suggest that parents may influence children’s emotion-processing neural circuitry.