Depression in children and adolescents is a prevalent, recurrent, and frequently chronic disorder, representing a considerable public health burden (Birmaher, Ryan, Williamson, Brent, & Kaufman, 2005; Costello et al., 2002). Consequently, an understanding of the disorder is critical for future intervention and prevention efforts. Previous research attempting to clarify family factors implicated in the transmission of depression from parents to youths has tended to focus on impairments in caregiving quality (such as parental warmth or harshness) for conferring risk. However, less work has examined dispositional characteristics of parents or considered other aspects of parenting behaviors beyond quality that might affect physiological and psychological processes implicated in depression. Across four studies, the current work sought to address this gap by exploring parental empathy as a dispositional characteristic of parents and interaction consistency as a structural component of families—two novel dimensions of family life—in relation to cellular inflammatory and emotion regulatory pathways emphasized in a biopsychosocial model of the transmission of depression. In a sample of children with asthma, the first study found that children whose parents demonstrated greater empathy (in the form of perspective-taking) had fewer internalizing symptoms and showed smaller asthma-relevant proinflammatory responses across a variety of functional immune assays. In a sample of medically healthy families, the second study then considered how youth depression and parental empathy might affect parents, revealing that parents who were higher in empathy showed greater inflammatory cytokine production when their children reported high levels of depressive symptoms, whereas less empathic parents showed the opposite pattern. Given this hidden physiological cost of empathy, the third study turned to an investigation of behavioral consistency in families as another potential contributor to youth depression, finding that greater variability in daily interactions between parents and youths predicted youths’ depression-relevant stimulated production of proinflammatory cytokines. Lastly, the fourth study tested a combined model for the transmission of depressive symptoms from parents to children through disruptions to behavioral consistency (in the form of family routines) and effects on inflammation and emotion regulation, showing that family routines accounted for part of the association between parent- and youth-depressive symptoms. Together, this set of studies identified new dimensions of family life implicated in the development of youth depression, while simultaneously exploring connections to important inflammatory and emotion regulatory processes.

Last modified

• 04/18/2018

Creator

• Erika Manczak

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N26Q5H

Subject

• Clinical Psychology

Keyword

• Inflammation
• Empathy
• Families
• Consistency
• Depression

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright