Parent’s anxiety sensitivity linked to teen’s brain patterns during emotional challenges

Children of parents who are highly sensitive to anxiety may show distinct patterns of brain activity when processing emotions, according to a new study published in the journal Development and Psychopathology. The researchers found that higher anxiety sensitivity in parents was linked to differences in how early adolescents’ brains respond when they’re asked to either embrace or regulate their emotional reactions to unpleasant or neutral images.

Many young people struggle with internalizing problems like anxiety and depression during early adolescence—a time when the brain is undergoing major emotional and social development. These problems can carry serious consequences, including academic difficulties, strained relationships, and a higher risk of long-term mental health issues. Identifying early influences that may increase a child’s vulnerability is a major goal of developmental research.

One characteristic that may play a role is anxiety sensitivity. This refers to the fear of physical signs of anxiety, such as a racing heart or nausea, and the belief that these symptoms could lead to harm—either physically, socially, or psychologically. Anxiety sensitivity is not a disorder in itself but may contribute to the development of emotional problems, particularly when combined with difficulties in regulating emotion.

Previous studies have shown that anxiety sensitivity can run in families, with parents potentially shaping their children’s emotional development through behavior, communication, and modeling. However, researchers had not yet examined how a parent’s level of anxiety sensitivity might influence the way their child’s brain handles emotional situations. The current study aimed to fill this gap by looking at how parents’ anxiety sensitivity relates to brain activation patterns in their children during an emotion regulation task.

“Heightened anxiety is increasingly impacting youth around the world, and studies show that the development of pathological levels of anxiety can be influenced by children’s parents, both biologically and in parenting behaviors,” said study author Leah D. Church, a graduate Student in clinical science at the University of Delaware and member of the Connectomics of Anxiety and Depression (CAD) Lab.

“Specifically, highly anxious parents may show avoidant and dysregulated behaviors that their children observe and begin to display themselves. We were interested in exploring understanding what brain functions were related to this transmission of anxious behavior from parent to child. To do so, we examined how parent’s levels of anxiety, specifically anxiety sensitivity (i.e., the fear of anxiety-related physical symptoms), was related to their children’s brain activity when the kids were asked to control their emotions. This could tell us whether disruptions in how children’s brains regulate emotion could be a way in which parental anxiety led to anxiety in their children.”

The study included 146 adolescents with an average age of about 12 years old, and their parents—most of whom were biological mothers. The researchers recruited families from the Delaware area. Adolescents completed a functional MRI scan while participating in an emotion regulation task. During this task, they viewed both neutral and emotionally negative images and were asked either to react naturally to the images or to use a distancing strategy to regulate their emotions.

Before the scan, parents and adolescents each completed a questionnaire assessing their own anxiety sensitivity. For parents, the questions focused on how much they feared bodily sensations associated with anxiety. For example, they rated how much they agreed with statements like “When I have trouble thinking clearly, I worry that something is wrong with me.” Children answered similar questions tailored to their age.

During the scanning session, the researchers measured activity in various parts of the brain as the adolescents engaged with the emotional images, either by reacting or regulating. They then examined whether the parents’ level of anxiety sensitivity was associated with the adolescents’ brain responses—while statistically controlling for the children’s own levels of anxiety sensitivity.

The results showed that parents’ anxiety sensitivity was associated with how their children’s brains responded when they were told to embrace, rather than regulate, their emotional reactions. Specifically, higher parental anxiety sensitivity was linked to increased activation in several brain areas involved in attention, evaluation of emotional information, and top-down control of behavior. These regions included parts of the orbitofrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

The strongest effects appeared when adolescents were instructed to react naturally to the images. In this condition, children of more anxiety-sensitive parents showed greater activation in brain regions involved in assessing the importance or threat level of stimuli. This pattern suggests that these children may be more attuned or reactive to emotional information in their environment, possibly because they have learned to model their parent’s heightened sensitivity to anxiety cues.

Interestingly, the association between parent anxiety sensitivity and adolescent brain activation was much weaker—or even absent—when the children were asked to regulate their emotions. In fact, the only brain region where parent anxiety sensitivity predicted activation in both react and regulate conditions was a section of the right orbitofrontal cortex. In this area, higher parental anxiety sensitivity was linked to more activity during the react condition and less activity during the regulate condition.

“We thought that parent anxiety would be related to brain differences related to regulating emotion, but instead found differences in how the children’s brains reacted to encountering emotional scenes,” Church told PsyPost. “This was surprising, because it seems that difficulty controlling emotions is not the problem, but instead that kids of anxious parents are reacting more strongly to the environment in general.”

Notably, these findings were specific to parental anxiety sensitivity, independent of the adolescents’ own levels of anxiety sensitivity. That means the observed effects cannot be explained simply by anxious tendencies in the children themselves.

The findings provide evidence that a parent’s sensitivity to anxiety-related symptoms may be reflected in their child’s brain functioning during emotional challenges. Children may not necessarily inherit these brain patterns genetically; instead, they might acquire them through observing how their parents respond to stress or emotional discomfort in everyday life. In families where parents show heightened concern about anxiety symptoms, children might learn to pay closer attention to emotional cues, leading to greater brain engagement in those areas that process and evaluate emotional information.

Alternatively, these brain patterns may reflect the child’s adaptations to a high-anxiety family environment. Adolescents may become more attuned to emotionally charged situations because they’ve learned—consciously or not—that these events matter a great deal to their parents. That could increase their own emotional reactivity over time, especially in settings where they are not actively trying to manage their emotions.

“We found that parent’s anxiety levels were related to differences in how their children’s brains reacted to seeing social scenes,” Church explained. “This was true even when we took the kid’s own anxiety into account, showing that our findings are not just due to anxiety the children already have. This underscores that disturbances in how children’s brains react emotionally to the world may be a way in which parental anxiety leads to anxiety in their children. Because we found brain differences in regions responsible for directing our attention to threat, our interpretation of these findings is that children watch their parents’ emotional responses to the world and later model this behavior.”

While the study had a relatively large sample for a brain imaging study, the participants were mostly white and non-Hispanic, limiting the generalizability of the findings. The parent group was also overwhelmingly composed of biological mothers, so the role of fathers or other caregivers remains less clear.

The study design was cross-sectional, meaning it cannot determine whether high parent anxiety sensitivity directly leads to changes in the child’s brain, or whether the observed brain patterns emerge due to other environmental or inherited factors. Longitudinal studies would be needed to track how these relationships evolve over time and to identify whether these early brain differences predict later emotional or mental health outcomes.

“We are continuing to collect data on our participants so that we can look at how these issues change over time,” Church said. “Ultimately, the long term goals are to be able to find the families that are at risk and help parents change the ways in which they are passing along their own anxiety to their children.”

The study, “Examining the unique contribution of parent anxiety sensitivity on adolescent neural responses during an emotion regulation task,” was authored by Leah D. Church, Nadia Bounoua, Anna Stumps, Melanie A. Matyi, and Jeffrey M. Spielberg.