Anxiety shapes emotional face and voice processing in mothers and their preterm children: A frequency-tagging EEG study

Background: Efficient processing of emotional socio-communicative cues is fundamental to human social interaction. Anxiety is associated with altered emotion processing, including heightened vigilance and negative attentional and interpretation biases that may compromise social functioning. Maternal anxiety may further shape offspring socio-emotional development, increasing vulnerability to psychopathology. However, the neural mechanisms underlying intergenerational associations between anxiety and emotion processing remain poorly understood.Methods: We examined self-reported anxiety and implicit neural emotion discrimination in mothers (N=46) and their prematurely born 5-year-old children (N=57). Using frequency-tagging EEG, we assessed neural sensitivity to emotional faces and voices. Associations between maternal anxiety and mothers’ own emotion processing, as well as children’s neural responses were examined, alongside links between child anxiety and neural sensitivity. In visual and auditory oddball paradigms, neutral faces or voices were presented at base rates with periodic expressive stimuli. Neural responses at the oddball frequency indexed implicit emotion discrimination, enabling objective measurement of emotional sensitivity. Results: Across modalities, mothers showed higher responses to fearful versus happy stimuli, indicating an implicit threat bias. Higher maternal anxiety predicted reduced neural sensitivity to fearful versus happy faces and voices, suggesting a negative interpretation bias and attenuated differentiation of emotional cues. In children, higher child anxiety was related to reduced right-hemispheric engagement during emotional face processing, while higher maternal anxiety predicted reduced sensitivity to emotional voices.Conclusion: These findings demonstrate that (subclinical) anxiety is associated with altered implicit emotion processing in both mothers and their children, highlighting potential neural mechanisms underlying intergenerational transmission of socio-emotional vulnerability.