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Parental input shapes youth self‐regulation development, and a lack of sensitive caregiving is a risk factor for youth mental health problems. Parents may shape youth regulation through their influence over biological (including neural) and behavioral development during childhood at both micro (moment‐to‐moment) and macro (global) levels. Prior studies have shown that micro‐level parent‐child interactions shape youth's biology contributing to youth mental health. However, it remains unclear whether prior disrupted/absent care affects those moment‐to‐moment parent‐youth interactions in ways that increase risk for youth psychopathology. In the current study, we calculated transfer entropy on cardiac data from parent‐youth dyads where the youth had either been exposed to disrupted care prior to adoption or not. Transfer Entropy (TE) tracks information flow between two signals, enhancing quantification of directional coupling, allowing for the examination of parent‐child and child‐parent influences. Using this novel approach, we identified lower cardiac information transfer from youth‐to‐parents in dyads where the youth had been exposed to disrupted/absent early care. Moreover we showed that the degree to which the parent's physiology changed in response to youth's physiology was negatively related to the youth's mental health, representing a potential pathway for elevated mental health risk in populations exposed to disrupted/absent early care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans learn about their environments by observing others, including what to fear and what to trust. Observational fear learning may be especially important early in life when children turn to their parents to gather information about their world. Yet, the vast majority of empirical research on fear learning in youth has thus far focused on firsthand classical conditioning, which may fail to capture one of the primary means by which fears are acquired during development. To address this gap in the literature, the present study examined observational fear learning in youth (n = 33; age range: 6–17 years) as they watched videos of their parent and an "unfamiliar parent" (i.e., another participant's parent) undergo fear conditioning. Youth demonstrated stronger fear learning when observing their parent compared to an unfamiliar parent, as indicated by changes in their self‐reported liking of the stimuli to which their parents were conditioned (CS+, a geometric shape paired with an aversive noise; CS‐, a geometric shape never paired with an aversive noise) and amygdala responses. Parent trait anxiety was associated with youth learning better (i.e., reporting a stronger preference for the CS‐ relative to CS+), and exhibiting stronger medial prefrontal‐amygdala connectivity. Neuroimaging data were additionally acquired from a subset of parents during firsthand conditioning, and parental amygdala and mPFC activation were associated with youth's neural recruitment. Together, these results suggest that youth preferentially learn fears via observation of their parents, and this learning is associated with emotional traits and neural recruitment in parents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]