Maladaptive offspring emotion regulation has been identified as one pathway linking maternal and child psychological well-being in school-aged children. Whether such a pathway is present earlier in life still remains unclear. The present study investigated the role of preschoolers’ emotion reactivity and regulation in the association between maternal psychological distress and child internalizing and externalizing problems. Children’s emotion reactivity and regulation were assessed through both observed behavior and physiology. At 42 months of age, children (n = 251; 128 girls) completed a fear induction task during which their heart-rate variability was assessed and their behavior was monitored, and maternal self-reports on depressive mood and anxiety were collected. At 48 months mothers and fathers reported on their children’s internalizing and externalizing problems. Higher maternal depressive mood was associated with lower child fear-related reactivity and regulation, as indexed by heart-rate variability. The latter mediated the association between higher maternal depressive mood and higher preschoolers’ externalizing problems. Overall, our findings support the role of preschoolers’ emotion reactivity and regulation in the relationship between maternal psychological distress and children’s socio-emotional difficulties. This role may also depend on the discrete emotion to which children react or seek to regulate as, here, we only assessed fear-related reactivity and regulation.

Background: The relationship between care recipients’ depressive symptoms and those of caregivers remains unknown. We evaluated the association between the depressive status of caregivers and that of community-dwelling disabled care recipients.

Methods: A prospective cohort study of 893 care recipients and paired caregivers was conducted. The care recipients were all eligible for a universal-coverage long-term care insurance program and their ages ranged from 65 to 104 years. They and their paired caregivers (age range 31–90 years) completed the 15-item Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS-15, score range: 0–15) assessment at baseline. The GDS-15 was used to measure the depression of caregivers and recipients with a threshold of <6/6+. The data included each care recipient's demographic characteristics, overall health status, basic activities of daily living, and comorbidities. The data also included the caregiver's demographic characteristics, including the caregiver's relationship to the recipient, and the caregiver's subjective burden as assessed by the Japanese version of the Zarit Burden Interview (ZBI).

Results: The mean GDS-15 scores of care recipients and caregivers were 6.7 points and 5.6 points, respectively. There was a positive correlation between the GDS-15 scores of caregivers and care recipients (r = 0.307, p<0.001). Multivariate logistic regression analysis adjusting for potential confounders including ZBI score indicated that the depressive symptoms of caregivers were associated with those whose care recipients were in the groups with moderate and high GDS-15 scores (OR: 1.97, 95% CI: 1.39–2.81, OR: 3.13, 95% CI: 1.87–5.24, respectively).

Conclusion: Caregivers’ depressive symptoms are associated with the depressive mood of the care recipients even after adjusting for confounders including caregiver burden.

Dans le domaine de la recherche en psychiatrie, un nouvel intérêt paraît se dessiner pour les émotions. Notre travail s’inscrit dans ce courant et relate les résultats obtenus avec une échelle polydimensionnelle d'évaluation de l’humeur dépressive. Une analyse en composantes principales (ACP) a été pratiquée sur la matrice de corrélations des 18 items de l'échelle administrée à 70 patients hospitalisés présentant un épisode dépressif majeur. Cinq facteurs se dégagent, ayant un sens clinique et statistique avant comme après rotation Vanmax: émoussement affectif, tristesse hyperexpressive/incontinence émotionnelle, irritabilité, labilité affective et tristesse douloureuse (Tableau II). Cet éclatement, en plusieurs dimensions, de l’humeur dépressive confirme qu’il s’agit bien d’un concept polysémique et non d’une entité clinique univoque. Les cinq composantes issues de l’ACP ne correspondent pas à des niveaux de complexité équivalente Certaines, comme la labilité affective, sont relativement simples alors que d’autres proviennent d’un arrangement complexe entre des symptômes correspondant à des niveaux d’observation très variés. Ceci plaide en faveur d’un dénombrement horizontal (selon les émotions identifiées) et vertical (selon les niveaux expressifs) de la sémiologie des affects chez les déprimés. Nous faisons l'hypothèse que de nombreux symptômes correspondent à des objets chimériques issus d’une réorganisation pathologique des niveaux expressits.