From Family Relationship to Regulation: Parent–Child Amygdala Activation Similarity is Linked to Prefrontal Recruitment and Youth Emotional Adaptation
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Extensive research highlights the importance of parent–child similarity at psychological, behavioral, and physiological levels in fostering children’s adaptation. While emerging studies have begun to explore neural similarity, little is known about the factors that influence parent– child neural similarity during adolescence or how such similarity may support youth emotional adaptation when coping with heightened uncertainty. The current study investigated the relations among family relationship quality, parent–youth neural similarity, and youth emotional adaptation using task-based fMRI. With 50 participants (25 parent–youth dyads; parent: M age = 43.88±7.42 years, 72% female; youths: M age = 11.16±2.85 years, 44% female), we found that higher parent–youth neural similarity in the amygdala activation patterns during emotionally uncertain situations was associated with better youths’ emotional adaptation, as indicated by lower levels of anxiety and depression and higher resilience. This neural similarity mediated the beneficial effects of positive family relationships on youths’ emotional adaptation. Additionally, amygdala activation similarity was associated with amygdala to dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) connectivity during uncertainty in youth, revealed by generalized psychophysiological interaction (gPPI) analyses. This amygdala-dlPFC connectivity, in turn, was linked to better emotional adaptation in youth. Importantly, these findings were specific to uncertainty-related bottom-up processing, rather than effortful top-down regulation processing or responses to certain aversive stimuli. These findings offer new insight into how relational and neural factors jointly shape youth emotional adaptation, and suggest that parent–child neural similarity in the amygdala may serve as a mechanism for supporting implicit emotion regulation, helping youth cope with uncertain situations.
Significance Statement
During adolescence, youth begin to expand their social worlds beyond the family, yet family relationships continue to shape how they navigate emotionally complex environments. How do these relationships influence youth brain function and emotional well-being? Using task-based fMRI, we found that greater parent–child neural similarity in the amygdala during emotionally uncertain situations is associated with youths’ lower anxiety and depression and greater resilience. This amygdala neural similarity was also linked to prefrontal engagement in youth during early arousal stage, supporting adaptive implicit regulation under uncertainty. These findings suggest that neural alignment between parents and youths may serve as a key mechanism by which positive family relationships promote emotional adaptation, highlighting the enduring role of family context in adolescent brain development.
