A 15-year study suggests that warmth and encouragement at age three may help shape children’s brain responses to pleasure, while harsher parenting is linked to reduced reward sensitivity.
A new study from the University of Notre Dame suggests that the tone of early parenting may shape how children’s brains learn to experience pleasure, a pattern that could matter for mental health well into the teenage years. Writing in Communications Psychology, psychologist Kaylin Hill and her colleagues found that children who experienced more warmth, support and encouragement at age 3 later showed stronger neural responses to rewards across adolescence, while those exposed to harsher or more intrusive parenting were less responsive to positive experiences.
The research tracked 465 young people and their parents over 15 years, beginning with laboratory observations of parent-child interactions when the children were toddlers and continuing with brain measurements at ages 9, 12, 15 and 18. The team used electroencephalogram, or EEG, recordings to monitor the brain’s response to winning money in a guessing game, a common way to measure reward processing, which is the brain function linked to feeling excitement, pleasure and satisfaction. The University of Notre Dame said the study was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health.
Hill, who leads the Psychophysiology of Affect across the Lifespan, or PAL, Lab at Notre Dame, has spent much of her career examining how emotional development and depression are connected. The PAL Lab says its work uses event-related potentials, a type of brain signal measured through EEG, to study how emotion, cognition and reward systems develop over time. The university’s psychology department describes Hill’s research programme as focused on identifying vulnerabilities linked to depression and finding ways to inform more effective interventions for families.
The findings add to a large body of research showing that depression and other mental health concerns often take root early in life. The National Alliance on Mental Illness says more than one in five adults in the United States experience mental illness each year, while more than one in seven young people aged 6 to 17 live with a mental health disorder. Against that backdrop, Hill said the results point to the value of supporting parents early, possibly even before a child is born, because parenting behaviours may be more changeable than genetic risk factors. While the study was observational and cannot prove cause and effect, it offers a clearer picture of how early family interactions may influence the developing brain and, over time, a child’s capacity for joy.
Disclaimer: This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical judgment, advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
