86 Chapter 4 ABSTRACT Eye contact improves mood, facilitates feelings of connectedness, and is assumed to strengthen the parent-child bond. Adolescent depression is linked to general difficulties in social interactions, including the parent-child relationship. We aim to elucidate adolescents’ affective and neural responses to prolonged eye contact with one’s parent and how these responses are affected by adolescent depression. While in the MRI scanner, 59 non-depressed (healthy controls; HC) and 19 depressed adolescents were asked to make eye contact with their parent, an unfamiliar peer, an unfamiliar adult, and themselves using videos of prolonged (16-38 s) direct and averted gaze. After each trial, adolescents reported on their mood and feelings of connectedness, and we measured their eye movements and BOLD-responses during the videos. Eye contact boosted adolescents’ mood and feelings of connectedness and increased activity in inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), temporal pole and superior frontal gyrus. Unlike HCs, eye contact did not boost the mood of depressed adolescents. While HCs reported increased mood and feelings of connectedness with their parent relative to others, depressed adolescents did not. Depressed adolescents exhibited blunted activity in IFG, potentially reflecting a blunted response to the prolonged presentation of faces. This study indicates that eye contact with others is less rewarding for depressed adolescents, including with their parents, whereas the blunted IFG may reflect a lack of social engagement characteristic for (adolescent) depression. Keywords: Prolonged eye contact; MDD; Parent-child bonding; Non-verbal social cues; fMRI; Eye tracking
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