Exposure to parents’ negative emotions in early life as a developmental pathway in the intergenerational transmission of depression and anxiety

This thesis aims to examine the links between exposure to parents’ depression and anxiety in the early years of life, and infants’ socio-emotional development. The thesis first focuses on the associations between infants’ and parents’ emotional expressions, and between infants’ and parents’ reactions to novel stimuli in everyday interactions, and next the associations between parents’ depression/anxiety, and infants’ attention to emotional stimuli are investigated. The findings of the current thesis reveal significant alterations in mothers’ and fathers’ emotional expressions in everyday interactions in case of lifetime anxiety and depression diagnoses. Moreover, these alterations were found to be linked to parallel alterations infants’ interactive behavior and to explain infants’ emotion processing.