It is therefore important to keep in mind that exposure effects that constitute the main scope of the current review are only one among many developmental mechanisms that may contribute to parent-to-child transmission of depression and anxiety. 2009), the current review specifically focuses on infants’ exposure to depressed/anxious parents’ negative emotions as an early developmental pathway to the intergenerational transmission.įrom a developmental psychopathology perspective, both adaptation and maladaptation arise from complex and dynamic transactions across psychological, biological, and social mechanisms operating at the intrapersonal and the interpersonal levels (Cicchetti and Dawson 2002 Sroufe 1990 Sroufe and Rutter 1984). Differently from previous work that addressed this diversity (Creswell and Waite 2015 Goodman and Gotlib 1999 Murray et al. A developmental psychopathology perspective on the intergenerational transmission of depression and anxiety embraces the diversity in the developmental pathways to depression and anxiety (Cicchetti and Toth 1998 Dadds and Vasey 2001). For those who do, there is a big variability in the outcomes. Despite the significant family loading, some children with depressed/anxious parents never develop depression/anxiety. Infants born to depressed or anxious parents not only inherit a genetic vulnerability that predisposes them to depression and anxiety, but they also grow in socio-emotional environments marked by alterations in parents’ emotional expressions (Eley et al. 2011 Beidel and Turner 1997 Turner et al. Depression and anxiety aggregate in families, in other words parents’ depression and anxiety disorders constitute risk for depression and anxiety in the offspring (Beardslee et al. Longitudinal designs that incorporate the study of early exposure to parents’ negative emotion, socio-emotional development in infancy, and later psychological functioning while considering other genetic and biological vulnerabilities should be prioritized in future research.ĭepression and anxiety disorders are among the most prevalent psychopathology in children (Kashani and Orvaschel 1990) and adults (Alonso et al. Given its potential links to infants’ emotional development, and to later psychological outcomes in children of parents with depression and anxiety, we conclude that early exposure to parental negative emotions is an important developmental mechanism that awaits further research. The links between exposure to parental negative emotion and development hold similarly in infants of parents with and without depression and/or anxiety diagnoses. In turn, infants exposed more to negative emotions from the parent seem to attend less to negative emotions in others’ facial expressions. Available evidence suggests that infants’ emotional expressions echo parents’ expressions and reactions in everyday interactions. We focus on infants’ emotional expressions in everyday parent–infant interactions, and on infants’ attention to negative facial expressions as early indices of emotional development. To address continuity between normative and maladaptive development, we discuss exposure to parental negative emotions in infants of parents with as well as without depression and/or anxiety diagnoses. We provide an overview of the little research available on the links between infants’ exposure to negative emotion and infants’ emotional development in this developmentally sensitive period, and highlight priorities for future research. In the present study, we focus on exposure to parental negative emotions in first postnatal year as a developmental pathway to early parent-to-child transmission of depression and anxiety.
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