Differential Neural Responding to Affective Stimuli in 6- to 8-year old Children at High Familial Risk for Depression: Associations with Behavioral Reward Seeking

Abstract Objective Children of depressed parents are at increased risk for psychopathology. One putative mechanism of risk appears to be altered processing of emotion-related stimuli. Although prior work has evaluated how adolescent offspring of depressed parents may show blunted reward processing compared to low-risk youth, there has been less attention to how young children with this familial history may differ from their peers during middle childhood, a period of critical socio-affective development Method The current study evaluated 56 emotionally healthy 6-to 8-year children who were deemed at high-risk ( n =25) or low-risk ( n =31) for depression based on maternal history of depression. Children completed a behavioral reward seeking task in the laboratory and an fMRI paradigm assessing neural response to happy faces, a social reward. Results Findings demonstrated that high-risk children showed blunted responding to happy faces in the dorsal striatum compared to low-risk children. Further, lower responding in the dorsal striatum and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was related to lower behavioral reward seeking, but only in high-risk children. Conclusion Function within neural reward regions may be altered in high-risk offspring as young as 6- to 8-years of age. Further, neural reward responding may be linked to lower behavioral response to obtain reward in these high-risk offspring.