7 191 Summary and general discussion INTER-INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN CONNECTEDNESS Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrated that both parents with a history of childhood emotional maltreatment (CEM) and depressed adolescents reported a consistently lower mood throughout the eye contact task. This is in line with prior evidence showing that depressed adolescents were found to have a tendency to perceive neutral facial stimuli as negative (Ahmed et al., 2015; Gilbert, 2012), and might therefore interpret eye contact as more negative compared to non-depressed adolescents. Furthermore, the profound overlap in responses to eye contact with others in parents with a history of CEM and depressed adolescents is no surprise given the fact that CEM is a key risk factor for depression (Spinhoven et al., 2016). Nevertheless, the lower mood in parents with a history of CEM survived a correction for the severity of depressive symptoms, indicating that this result was at least not entirely driven by symptoms of depression. Remarkably, parents with a history of CEM and depressed adolescents not only reported a lower mood in response to eye contact with unknown others, but also after making eye contact with their own child or parent. This is in contrast to parents with no CEM and non-depressed adolescents who experienced a better mood after making eye contact with their child or parent, respectively. Although not directly investigated, it is conceivable that these blunted mood responses to their own child or parent contribute to dysfunctional interaction patterns between parents and adolescents, potentially threatening the parent-child relationship. Moreover, given the overlap between parents with a history of CEM and adolescent depression it is likely that such blunted response patterns might generalize to parent-child dyads of whom a caregiver suffers from depression or situations in which a child has been emotionally abused and/or neglected by their parent. Elucidating such factors potentially contributes to the early identification of families that are at high risk for dysfunctional family dynamics and might contribute to the development of targeted interventions focus on strengthening of the parent-child bond, which may be a fruitful direction for future research. In line with the blunted mood responses in depressed adolescents towards their own parents, we found a comparable effect in this sample in another task within the RE-PAIR study. Unlike their non-depressed counterparts, depressed adolescents showed difficulties to benefit from parental praise, aligning with the thought that they are struggling with the acceptance of social support of others, including of their parents (van Houtum, wever, et al., 2023). Although these findings seem to point into the direction of an altered perception of their parents’ caregiving behavior, evidence has shown that a more negative parenting style (i.e., less warmth, more overprotection, less autonomy granting) has also been linked to the development of depression in adolescents, also in studies with a prospective design (Schwartz et al., 2014). Moreover, both processes may also reinforce each other. The current studies cannot disentangle these two pathways. However, future analyses on behaviorally coded observed parent-child interactions,
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