Does maternal depression affect mothers' young children? If so, how? Those are the questions that Penn State Associate Professor of Psychology Katie Burkhouse and a colleague at Vanderbilt University aim to answer with a five-year, $3.8 million grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Mental Health.
"We're trying to understand the precise mechanisms within the children of depressed mothers that place them at higher risk for developing not just depression but also anxiety - because if you have a parent with a history of depression, you're at increased risk for multiple forms of psychopathology," Burkhouse said. "Most of the prior work in this area has been with children during middle or late childhood and hasn't been done with kids during early childhood, so our goal is to try and intervene at the earliest possible point."
Burkhouse and Autumn Kujawa, associate professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University, previously studied mothers with depression and kids in the later stages of childhood and adolescence. They and others found that children of mothers with depression are two to three times more likely to develop anxiety and depressive disorders than children whose mothers have not experienced depression, and that disruptions in how children process and respond to positive and negative emotional information may be one way through which these disorders develop in these children.
With that information, and other research findings, Burkhouse and Kujawa developed a prevention program to enhance positive emotions in children and their depressed mothers. They previously demonstrated that the program holds promise for preventing the emergence of anxiety and depressive symptoms in these at-risk offspring during middle-to-late childhood.
The new study, "Charting Affect and Reward during Early Childhood" (CARE), seeks to understand how positive emotions develop in a younger cohort of children, ages 4 to 6, and determine whether alterations in positive emotions can predict internalizing symptoms of anxiety and depression in early childhood. If so, the goal would be to modify their prevention program for kids of depressed mothers during early childhood to see if it enhances positive emotions and reward response and prevents internalizing symptoms, said Burkhouse, principal investigator for the Families, Affective Neuroscience, and Mood Disorders (FAM) Lab.
The researchers are recruiting 450 mother-child dyads - half of the mothers with a history of depression - for the study, which will take place at both Penn State and Vanderbilt.
When the mothers and children come in for their first visit, they'll be assessed via a series of interviews and questionnaires. From there, the children will be given some computer games to gauge reward function and positive emotion activity, said Burkhouse, an affiliated faculty member with the College of the Liberal Arts' Child Study Center.
In addition, the depressed mothers and children will perform several parent-child interaction tasks that will measure parenting practices to study potential factors that promote resilience in these children of depressed mothers.
"While mothers are experiencing depression, many still have some positive parenting styles that might prevent the child from developing depression," Burkhouse said. "We're looking at factors that either accelerate these pathways to anxiety and depression or factors that inhibit them."
The mothers and children will come back for additional assessments a year and two years after the initial visit. That will allow Burkhouse, Kujawa and their research team to track the children's emotions over time, and gauge whether they might prove to be predictors of anxiety and/or depression.
"Do positive emotions and reward functioning change in kids of depressed mothers as they progress throughout development, or do these processes remain stable?" Burkhouse said. "What we don't know is, if you're at risk of developing depression, does it increase the same way as it does for psychiatrically low-risk kids? We're very excited to extend this work to children in early childhood in order to develop intervention programs for kids at the earliest possible point."
Burkhouse and Kujawa's co-investigators on the study are Penn State Professor of Psychology Erika Lunkenheimer and Vanderbilt's Kathryn Humphreys and David Cole.
