Speaker
Description
Parents exert a significant influence on their children's development through both genetic and environmental pathways. Behavioral studies have demonstrated this intergenerational transfer across various behaviors, including attachment styles, emotion regulation strategies, and the development of psychopathologies. However, the extent to which this transfer can be observed at the neural level remains unclear. This study aims to investigate neural similarity within parent-child dyads during naturalistic movie-watching. Participants included 63 families (57 mothers, 46 fathers, 61 boys, and 48 girls, aged 6 to 14) who watched a 12-minute montage of clips from the movie Inside Out while undergoing fMRI. We extracted neural activation time courses from 50 regions of interest for each participant. Neural similarity was then assessed by correlating the time courses across each possible adult-child dyad. Our results indicate that, across the entire brain, parent-child dyads exhibited significantly higher neural similarity compared to stranger-child dyads. Future analyses will explore differences between matrilineal and patrilineal transmission, as well as the relationship between neural similarity, behavioral similarity, and child behavior. These findings contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms underlying intergenerational transmission and the identification of factors that may support or hinder this process.
