“In my lab, we’re trying to understand whether differences in how children process emotional information might play a role in depression risk, looking at how children process both negative and positive information, like rewards. In general, adults and adolescents with depression don’t respond as much to receiving rewards relative to individuals that are not depressed. Studies have shown that the youth of parents with depression also don’t respond as much to rewards, whether behaviorally or in the brain, even before they’ve experienced depression themselves. 

“I am studying younger children of depressed parents to see how early this individual difference can be detected. Kids join our study between ages 4 and 6, we follow them for two years, studying environmental factors and electroencephalogram markers to look for responses to rewards. Receiving a reward typically activates different areas of the brain, but in depressed adults and adolescents, those areas don’t come online to the same extent. We want to see if this applies to younger at-risk children.

“Five years ago, my colleague at Vanderbilt and I developed a prevention program for depressed mothers and their offspring to enhance reward functioning in hopes of changing their trajectory and preventing depression. It has been effective in reducing symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress in the kids that participated in it. We’re hoping to modify the program for younger children to prevent depression at the earliest possible point.”