The Association Between Early Parenting Styles With Anxiety And Related Brain Regions In Adulthood

Experiences during early life have a long-term impact and can shape emotion and cognition into adulthood.In particular parenting style may have a strong effect such that negative parenting styles can develop into early life stress and lead to the experience of negative emotions,such as anxiety,fear,and promote the development of emotional disorders,i.e.,anxiety disorders.Therefore,it’s of critical importance to understand the impact of parenting styles on adult anxiety and the underlying brain basis.Previous studies mostly focused on individuals with extreme or unspecific negative experiences such as childhood abuse or neglect or on individuals with mental disorders.However,surprisingly few studies have examined the impact of early parenting styles on anxiety levels and the brain basis in healthy adults.Therefore,were here examined associations between parenting style and anxiety in adulthood in 1110 participants and associations with intrinsic amygdala functioning by resting state magnetic resonance imaging in 206 of them.The relationship between positive and negative early parenting styles and adult anxiety and related brain mechanisms were investigated.Analysis of behavioral data showed that the mother’s emotional warmth,overprotectiveness,and rejection all affected adult anxiety levels,while only father’s emotional warmth had an influence.Resting-state MRI data showed that emotional warmth scores were significantly negatively correlated with intrinsic amygdala activation,and that specifically mother’s emotional warmth drove the association.Functional connectivity results showed that adult anxiety levels were significantly negatively correlated with functional connectivity between the amygdala-precuneus and cerebellum.The whole-brain level analysis found that mother’s emotional warmth was positively correlated with activation of the central posterior gyrus.In summary,this paper shows that in particular mother’s parenting style may have an impact on adult anxiety,in particular emotional warmth of mothers may play a key role in reducing anxiety and understanding the emotions of others in adulthood.These results suggest that early parenting styles profoundly and persistently affect individuals’ emotional development,and these effects can persist into adulthood.