2 - (SYM 78) The Influence of Parental Neural Error Monitoring on Child Anxiety and Peer Outcomes in Children Characterized by Overcontrol

Abstract Body
Overcontrol is a transdiagnostic phenotype, rooted in personality, and characterized by cognitive inflexibility, perfectionism, and heightened tendencies to notice mistakes (error monitoring) that crystalizes in early childhood and is associated with elevated childhood anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) symptoms and difficulties with peer functioning. Overcontrol is thought to be heritable, however, little is known about how caregiver’s own error monitoring may contribute to child psychiatric and peer outcomes. Given that caregiver modeling and caregiver styles are implicated in child anxiety and OCD, we aimed to assess the role of parent’s neural error-monitoring on outcomes. The current study examined the association of caregivers’ neural error monitoring with child psychiatric symptoms and peer functioning in children characterized by overcontrol. We hypothesized that in the context of elevated child overcontrolled tendencies, higher caregiver error-monitoring, as evidenced by a more negative error-related negativity (ERN), a electroencephalogram (EEG) based neural marker of error-monitoring, would be associated with elevated child symptoms of anxiety and OCD and worse peer relations. Participants included 63 community parents and children (aged 7-9 years) from a longitudinal study, oversampled for elevated child overcontrolled tendencies. Parents completed reports of child overcontrol, psychiatric, and peer functioning and a Flanker Task, during which EEG recordings measured the ERN. Moderation analyses, controlling for child age and parent behavioral errors, revealed an interaction between child overcontrol and the parent ERN-residual predicting child anxiety (p=.025) and peer functioning (p=.024) but not OCD symptoms. In the context of high child overcontrolled tendencies, a blunted (more positive) parent ERN-residual was associated with higher childhood anxiety and worse child peer relations. Counter to hypotheses, lower caregiver error monitoring was associated with worse child outcomes in the context of elevated child overcontrol. Findings highlight the importance of the parent-child ‘fit,’ such that overcontrolled children may thrive in more structured, planned and performance-monitored environments. An alternative explanation could be that child overcontrolled behavioral tendencies impact parental response patterns, such that when children are overcontolled and error-focused, parents tend to monitor errors less.