The Role of Parent-Child Interaction Therapy in Modifying Children’s Neural Profiles: A Resting EEG Study of Children’s Response to Experience

The neural networks responsible for coordinating top-down self-regulatory processes, or executive functions, undergo intense fine-tuning and reorganization in early childhood. For children faced with prolonged stress (e.g., chaotic household environment, uncertainty) or adversity (e.g., poverty, maltreatment), these executive function processes are sculpted to aid in retaining information about threats to well-being, which may be protective short-term, but can become particularly maladaptive over time. Interventions that modify the caregiving environment have been shown to buffer the effects of adversity on children’s neural development. Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) is one such intervention that has been shown to improve both parenting behavior and child outcomes in meta-analyses and is one of the only interventions evidenced to reduce child maltreatment recidivism. The present study sought to evaluate the effects of PCIT on 3-8-year-old children’s theta/beta ratio, a neural marker of attention regulation as measured by electroencephalogram (EEG). Next, this study sought to examine whether individual differences in parenting changes across the PCIT intervention were related to children’s theta/beta ratio, for the PCIT group only. Data for this dissertation were drawn from a randomized control trial investigating the biobehavioral mechanisms of change in parent and child self-regulation skills as a result of PCIT for child-welfare involved families (NIDA R01 036533; PIs: Skowron & Fisher). 204 parent-child dyads with a history of child welfare involvement were referred into the study by the local Lane County Department of Human Services and randomized to PCIT or services-as-usual control conditions. The hypothesis that adversity-exposed children in PCIT would show lower theta/beta ratios, indicative of better attention regulation, after accounting for psychosocial risk, was supported for the eyes-closed but not the eyes-open condition. The hypothesis that individual differences in parenting skill change in PCIT group would be associated with children’s post-treatment theta/beta ratio was not supported. Taken together, this study fills a valuable gap in understanding whether parenting intervention, namely PCIT, can modify children’s neural markers of attention regulation after accounting for early adversity exposure