Girls' Childhood Relationships, Adolescent Reward Circuitry, And Depression: A Prospective, Longitudinal Study

Challenging family contexts are a potent influence on brain development, with consequences for depression. Family relationship factors—for example, low mother-child relationship quality or low warmth— are especially associated with function in neural reward systems. Using detailed social-context measures and fMRI in a prospective longitudinal study of high-risk girls, this presentation will examine neural response to reward as a mechanism of associations between early adversity and adolescent depression.