Browsing by Author "Qu, Yang"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Editorial: Similarities and Discrepancies Across Family Members at Multiple Levels: Insights From Behavior, Psychophysiology, and Neuroimaging
    Rogers, Christy Rae; Qu, Yang; Lee, Tae-Ho; Liu, Siwei; Kim, Sun Hyung (Frontiers, 2022-01-28)
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    Family Cohesion Moderates the Relation between Parent–Child Neural Connectivity Pattern Similarity and Youth’s Emotional Adjustment
    Zhou, Zexi; Chen, Ya-Yun; Yang, Beiming; Qu, Yang; Lee, Tae-Ho (Society for Neuroscience, 2023-08-16)
    Despite a recent surge in research examining parent–child neural similarity using fMRI, there remains a need for further investigation into how such similarity may play a role in children’s emotional adjustment. Moreover, no prior studies explored the potential contextual factors that may moderate the link between parent–child neural similarity and children’s developmental outcomes. In this study, 32 parent–youth dyads (parents: Mage = 43.53 years, 72% female; children: Mage = 11.69 years, 41% female) watched an emotion-evoking animated film while being scanned using fMRI. We first quantified how similarly emotion network interacts with other brain regions in responding to the emotion-evoking film between parents and their children. We then examined how such parent–child neural similarity is associated with children’s emotional adjustment, with attention to the moderating role of family cohesion. Results revealed that higher parent–child similarity in functional connectivity pattern during movie viewing was associated with better emotional adjustment, including less negative affect, lower anxiety, and greater ego resilience in youth. Moreover, such associations were significant only among families with higher cohesion, but not among families with lower cohesion. The findings advance our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying how children thrive by being in sync and attuned with their parents, and provide novel empirical evidence that the effects of parent–child concordance at the neural level on children’s development are contextually dependent.
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    Love flows downstream: mothers’ and children’s neural representation similarity in perceiving distress of self and family
    Lee, Tae-Ho; Qu, Yang; Telzer, Eva H. (Oxford University Press, 2017)
    The current study aimed to capture empathy processing in an interpersonal context. Mother–adolescent dyads (N¼22) each completed an empathy task during fMRI, in which they imagined the target person in distressing scenes as either themselves or their family (i.e. child for the mother, mother for the child). Using multi-voxel pattern approach, we compared neural pattern similarity for the self and family conditions and found that mothers showed greater perceptual similarity between self and child in the fusiformface area (FFA), representing high self–child overlap, whereas adolescents showed significantly less self–mother overlap. Adolescents’ pattern similarity was dependent upon family relationship quality, such that they showed greater self–mother overlap with higher relationship quality, whereas mothers’ pattern similarity was independent of relationship quality. Furthermore, adolescents’ perceptual similarity in the FFA was associated with increased social brain activation (e.g. temporal parietal junction). Mediation analyses indicated that high relationship quality was associated with greater social brain activation, which was mediated by greater self–mother overlap in the FFA. Our findings suggest that adolescents show more distinct neural patterns in perceiving their own vs their mother’s distress, and such distinction is sensitive to mother–child relationship quality. In contrast, mothers’ perception for their own and child’s distress is highly similar and unconditional.
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    Neural Representation of Parental Monitoring and Links to Adolescent Risk Taking
    Lee, Tae-Ho; Qu, Yang; Telzer, Eva H. (2019-12-03)
    Decades of developmental research have demonstrated the positive role of parental monitoring during adolescence, a time during which youth seek exploration and show heightened risk taking. The present study employed a novel neural pattern similarity approach to identify neural patterns underpinning parental monitoring, with attention to implications for adolescent risk taking. Mothers (N = 23) underwent an fMRI scan during which they completed a risk-taking task and viewed the risk-taking behavior of their adolescent child. Using a representational similarity analysis, we examined the neural pattern similarity between mothers' anticipation of their child's risk taking and their own decisions. Higher parental monitoring was reflected in greater similarity between neural pattern of anticipating their adolescents' risk taking and experiencing their own safe outcomes. Moreover, greater neural pattern similarity between mothers' anticipation and their own safe outcomes was associated with lower risk-taking propensity in adolescents. Taken together, the present study provides preliminary evidence for the neural patterns underpinning parental monitoring, highlighting the importance of incorporating parents' brain as a window to understand parenting practices and adolescent risk taking.
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    Parent-child Neural Similarity: Measurements, Antecedents, and Consequences
    Qu, Yang; Zhou, Zexi; Lee, Tae-Ho (Frontiers, 2023-03-29)
    Children and their parents are wired to connect as it provides the foundation for developing children to adapt to an increasingly complex environment. Although extensive studies demonstrate the importance of parent-child dyadic similarity at the behavioral, psychological, and physiological levels in fostering children’s learning and psychological wellbeing, little is known about parent- child similarity at the neural level until recently. Drawing on our own work and the work by other scholars, this review summarizes recent advances in empirical research on parent-child neural similarity. Specifically, this review elaborates the theoretical importance of studying parent-child neural similarity and showcases how parent-child neural similarity is assessed using di􀀀erent neuroimaging approaches. We further synthesize empirical evidence about the contextual and individual factors thatmay contribute to variability in parent-child neural similarity, summarize how such neural similarity is related to di􀀀erent aspects of child adjustment, and highlight important directions for future research. Taken together, we hope that this integrative review can demonstrate cutting-edge research that explores neural similarity in parent-child dyads, and provide researchers with a clear roadmap to examine parent-child neural similarity in order to gain a better understanding of parental socialization process and brain development.