A convergent behavioral-neural profile of parental dysregulation and the link between parent-child brain-state similarity and child negative affect
- 1Virginia Tech
Abstract
Parent-child neural similarity is often interpreted as a marker of attunement, but its developmental significance may not be uniformly positive across family environments. We tested whether the parent's own emotional and regulatory profile, measured both behaviorally and neurally, moderates the developmental significance of parent-child neural similarity. Applying a hidden Markov model (HMM-MAR; K = 6 states) to whole-brain fMRI timeseries from 32 parent-youth dyads who separately watched the same emotional film, we derived per-dyad measures of brain-state similarity. Parent-child dyads showed greater brain-state similarity than parent-shuffle null pairs (d = -0.55, p = .004), indicating dyad-specific alignment beyond responses shared across viewers of the same film. Parent self-reported internalizing showed only a weak direct relation to child negative affect (r = .31, p = .085). However, the association between neural similarity and child negative affect depended on parent internalizing (b = 5.62, p = .018; R^2): stronger parent-child similarity predicted higher child negative affect when parents reported higher, but not lower, internalizing. A parallel interaction emerged when parent internalizing was replaced by a neural index of the parent's own state dynamics (parent neural-state unpredictability, Htrans; b = 5.95, p = .004), indicating that the effect reflects the parent's broader regulatory profile rather than a single measurement modality. Both interactions were clearest in the primary model and only partially robust across model orders and parcellations. These findings suggest that dyadic neural similarity should be interpreted in context: resembling a parent with a dysregulated profile may confer risk rather than protection.
Related
- A CRISPR/Cas9 screen reveals convergent dysregulation of neurological pathways within and across glycosylation pathways
- Meta-analysis of brain and blood transcriptional signatures of neuroimmune dysregulation in Schizophrenia: convergent evidence for excessive complement system activity and CX3CL1-CX3CR1 axis disruption
- Impaired Control Symptoms in Alcohol Use Disorder Show Convergent Associations Across Behavioral and Neural Markers of Inhibitory Control and Drinking Behavior
- Protein novelty, sequence similarity, and negative sampling controls reveal benchmark specific discrimination in protein protein interactionprediction
- Scale-dependent associations between genetic similarity and aggregation behaviour in three toad lineages
BibTeX
@misc{li2026convergent,
title = {{A convergent behavioral-neural profile of parental dysregulation and the link between parent-child brain-state similarity and child negative affect}},
author = {Q. Li and Y.-Y. Chen and Z. Zhou and Y. Qu and J. Kim-Spoon and T.-H. Lee},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.64898/2026.09.15.751857},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.15.751857v1},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - A convergent behavioral-neural profile of parental dysregulation and the link between parent-child brain-state similarity and child negative affect
AU - Q. Li
AU - Y.-Y. Chen
AU - Z. Zhou
AU - Y. Qu
AU - J. Kim-Spoon
AU - T.-H. Lee
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/15
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.09.15.751857
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.15.751857v1
AB - Parent-child neural similarity is often interpreted as a marker of attunement, but its developmental significance may not be uniformly positive across family environments. We tested whether the parent's own emotional and regulatory profile, measured both behaviorally and neurally, moderates the developmental significance of parent-child neural similarity. Applying a hidden Markov model (HMM-MAR; K = 6 states) to whole-brain fMRI timeseries from 32 parent-youth dyads who separately watched the same emotional film, we derived per-dyad measures of brain-state similarity. Parent-child dyads showed greater brain-state similarity than parent-shuffle null pairs (d = -0.55, p = .004), indicating dyad-specific alignment beyond responses shared across viewers of the same film. Parent self-reported internalizing showed only a weak direct relation to child negative affect (r = .31, p = .085). However, the association between neural similarity and child negative affect depended on parent internalizing (b = 5.62, p = .018; R^2): stronger parent-child similarity predicted higher child negative affect when parents reported higher, but not lower, internalizing. A parallel interaction emerged when parent internalizing was replaced by a neural index of the parent's own state dynamics (parent neural-state unpredictability, Htrans; b = 5.95, p = .004), indicating that the effect reflects the parent's broader regulatory profile rather than a single measurement modality. Both interactions were clearest in the primary model and only partially robust across model orders and parcellations. These findings suggest that dyadic neural similarity should be interpreted in context: resembling a parent with a dysregulated profile may confer risk rather than protection.
ER -