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The transition to adolescence is a critical period for mental health development. Socio-experiential environments play an important role in the emergence of depressive symptoms with some adolescents showing more sensitivity to social contexts than others. Drawing on recent developmental neuroscience advances, we examined whether hippocampal volume amplifies social context effects in the transition to adolescence. We analyzed 2-y longitudinal data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD^®) study in a diverse sample of 11,832 youth (mean age: 9.914 y; range: 8.917 to 11.083 y; 47.8% girls) from 21 sites across the United States. Socio-experiential environments (i.e., family conflict, primary caregiver’s depressive symptoms, parental warmth, peer victimization, and prosocial school environment), hippocampal volume, and a wide range of demographic characteristics were measured at baseline. Youth’s symptoms of major depressive disorder were assessed at both baseline and 2 y later. Multilevel mixed-effects linear regression analyses showed that negative social environments (i.e., family conflict, primary caregiver’s depressive symptoms, and peer victimization) and the absence of positive social environments (i.e., parental warmth and prosocial school environment) predicted greater increases in youth’s depressive symptoms over 2 y. Importantly, left hippocampal volume amplified social context effects such that youth with larger left hippocampal volume experienced greater increases in depressive symptoms in more negative and less positive social environments. Consistent with brain–environment interaction models of mental health, these findings underscore the importance of families, peers, and schools in the development of depression during the transition to adolescence and show how neural structure amplifies social context sensitivity. 

Abstract Parents' familism values predict a variety of Latinx American youth's academic adjustment. However, it is unclear how cultural values such as familism interact with youth's brain development, which is sensitive to sociocultural input, to shape their academic adjustment. Using a sample of 1916 Latinx American youth (mean age = 9.90 years, SD = .63 years; 50% girls) and their primary caregivers (mean age = 38.43 years, SD = 6.81 years; 90% mothers) from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, this study examined the longitudinal relation between parents' familism values and youth's school disengagement, as well as the moderating role of youth's neural sensitivity to personal reward. Parents' familism values predicted youth's decreased school disengagement 1 year later, adjusting for their baseline school disengagement and demographic covariates. Notably, this association was more salient among youth who showed lower (vs. higher) neural activation in the ventral striatum and the lateral OFC during the anticipation of a personal reward. These findings underscore the protective role of familism for Latinx American youth, highlighting the necessity of developing culturally informed interventions that take into consideration a youth's brain development. 

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 different neuroimaging approaches. We further synthesize empirical evidence about the contextual and individual factors that may contribute to variability in parent-child neural similarity, summarize how such neural similarity is related to different 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. 

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:M_age= 43.53 years, 72% female; children:M_age= 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. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTWhat neural processes underlie the attunement between children and their parents that helps children thrive? Using a naturalistic movie-watching fMRI paradigm, we find that greater parent–child similarity in how emotion network interacts with other brain regions during movie viewing is associated with youth's better emotional adjustment including less negative affect, lower anxiety, and greater ego resilience. Interestingly, these associations are only significant among families with higher cohesion, but not among those with lower cohesion. Our findings provide novel evidence that parent–child shared neural processes to emotional situations can confer benefits to children, and underscore the importance of considering specific family contexts in which parent–child neural similarity may be beneficial or detrimental to children's development, highlighting a crucial direction for future research. 

Abstract Adolescence is often associated with an increase in psychopathology. Although previous studies have examined how family environments and neural reward sensitivity separately play a role in youth’s emotional development, it remains unknown how they interact with each other in predicting youth’s internalizing symptoms. Therefore, the current research took a biopsychosocial approach to examine this question using two-wave longitudinal data of 9353 preadolescents (mean age = 9.93 years at T1; 51% boys) from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study. Using mixed-effects models, results showed that higher family conflict predicted youth’s increased internalizing symptoms 1 year later, whereas greater ventral striatum (VS) activity during reward receipt predicted reduced internalizing symptoms over time. Importantly, there was an interaction effect between family conflict and VS activity. For youth who showed greater VS activation during reward receipt, high family conflict was more likely to predict increased internalizing symptoms. In contrast, youth with low VS activation during reward receipt showed high levels of internalizing symptoms regardless of family conflict. The findings suggest that youth’s neural reward sensitivity is a marker of susceptibility to adverse family environments and highlight the importance of cultivating supportive family environments where youth experience less general conflict within the family. 

Abstract In past decades, the positive role of self‐control in students' academic success has attracted plenty of scholarly attention. However, fewer studies have examined the link between adolescents' neural development of the inhibitory control system and their academic achievement, especially using a longitudinal approach. Moreover, less is known about the role of parents in this link. Using large‐scale longitudinal data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study (N = 9574; mean age = 9.94 years at baseline, SD = .63; 50% girls), the current study took an integrative biopsychosocial approach to explore the longitudinal link between early adolescents' fronto‐striatal connectivity and their academic achievement, with attention to the moderating role of parental warmth. Results showed that weaker intrinsic connectivity between the frontoparietal network and the striatum was associated with early adolescents' worse academic achievement over 2 years during early adolescence. Notably, parental warmth moderated the association between fronto‐striatal connectivity and academic achievement, such that weaker fronto‐striatal connectivity was only predictive of worse academic achievement among early adolescents who experienced low levels of parental warmth. Taken together, the findings demonstrate weaker fronto‐striatal connectivity as a risk factor for early adolescents' academic development and highlight parental warmth as a protective factor for academic development among those with weaker connectivity within the inhibitory control system.