If you have siblings, you are likely to have had the ongoing debate about who is mom's favorite. But according to a new study, winning that title is not necessarily a good thing; it may increase the risk for depression. 
 
 
 
 Adult children who felt they were emotionally closer to their mother than their siblings were more likely to show signs of depression. Adult children who felt they were emotionally closer to their mother than their siblings were more likely to show signs of depression. 
 
 Study coauthor Jill Suitor, a professor of sociology at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN, and colleagues publish their findings in the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences. 
 
 The study involved 725 adult children from 309 families who were a part of the Within-Family Differences Study - a longitudinal project that aims to gain a better understanding of the relationship between parents and their adult children. 
 
 Mothers in each family were aged between 65-75 in 2001 when the study began, and data on children's perceptions of favoritism and disfavoritism from mothers were assessed 7 years apart. 
 
 Specifically, the researchers looked at data on four measures of favoritism and disfavoritism: children's perception of emotional closeness with their mother, their perception of conflict, their perception of pride from their mother, and their perception of disappointment. The team also assessed depressive symptoms among the children. 
 
 Sibling rivalry due to favoritism may induce depressive symptoms 
 
 The team found the highest reports of depressive symptoms came from children who believed they were emotionally closer to their mother than their siblings and those who believed they were the sibling their mother was most disappointed in. 
 
 The team also analyzed their findings by race; they explain that previous studies have demonstrated higher levels of closeness between older mothers and adult children in black families. Around a quarter of the families in the study were black. 
 
 "What we found suggests that the black offspring were particularly distressed when they, as opposed to their siblings, were the children in whom mothers were most disappointed," says Suitor. 
 
 Commenting on the take-home message from their results, the authors say: 
 
 "These patterns suggest that the association between psychological well-being and both favoritism and disfavoritism can be accounted for by processes involving social comparison rather than equity for both black and white adult children in midlife." 
 
 Next, the team plans to investigate whether similar results arise from studying adult children's perceptions of favoritism and disfavoritsm from fathers. They also want to study whether they can predict favoritism between mothers and adult children. 
 
 In September, Medical News Today reported on a study that suggests young children of parents who are warmer and less controlling are more likely to have greater life satisfaction and mental well-being in adulthood. 
 
 And more recently, a controversial study reported by MNT suggests children of religious parents are less likely to be generous than those of non-religious parents. ||||| Are you your mother’s favorite? While that may seem like an advantage, think again, say Purdue University researchers. Their new study indicates you are not guaranteed psychological resilience as a result of protective love. 
 
 “Adult children who reported that they were most emotionally close to their mothers also reported higher depressive symptoms,” wrote the authors of the new study. 
 
 Apparently, no one gets off easy, because it wasn’t only the mama’s boys and mommy’s girls who grew up to be sad adults. 
 
 “Depressive symptoms were also higher when respondents identified themselves as being the children with whom their mothers had the greatest conflict, and in whom the mothers were most disappointed,” wrote the authors. 
 
 The One Thing Moms Never Tell 
 
 Though a good mother would never admit it, she really does have a favorite child, according to previous studies conducted by the research team. Dr. Jill Suitor, a professor of sociology at Purdue, and Dr. Karl Pillemer, a professor of gerontology in medicine at the Weill Cornell Medical College, first began their collaboration on the Within-Family Differences Study (WFDS) in 2001. Their goal was to achieve a greater understanding of relations in aging families. The researchers collected data from 725 adult children (average age of 49) within 309 families in which mothers were between the ages of 65 and 75 when the project began. The study occurred in two phases seven years apart. 
 
 The researchers analyzed the adult children and their relationships with their mothers, looking in particular at four dimensions of favoritism/disfavoritism: emotional closeness, conflict, pride, and disappointment. Surprisingly — or possibly not — the siblings continued to compare themselves to each other well into middle age. The constant appraisal and judgments, the researchers discovered, were the root cause of unhappiness. 
 
 Apparently, those adults who were perceived to be closer to the mother experienced more tension from their siblings, while also feeling greater responsibility for taking care of their aging mothers. Meanwhile, those who argued with their mothers or felt they’d disappointed her also suffered. In particular, disappointing Mom affected black adult children more than white adult children. However, this was the single racial difference discovered by the researchers. 
 
 The study results also indicate no differences based on gender. Both sons and daughters felt the weight of their mother’s opinion, whether good or bad, equally. 
 
 Source: Suitor JJ, Gilligan M, Peng S, Jung JH, Pillemer K. Role of Perceived Maternal Favoritism and Disfavoritism in Adult Children's Psychological Well-Being. Journal of Gerontology Social Sciences. 2015. ||||| We often attribute key characteristics to one of our parents: “He gets his athleticism from his father.” “Her quickness to anger—that’s all her mother.” Whether the genetics are actually pulling the strings in these cases is another story. But a growing body of research has suggested that heredity does apply to mood disorders—including depression, which afflicts more than 2.8 million adolescents in the U.S. alone—and that there is compelling evidence hereditary ties are strong between mothers and daughters. 
 
 Researchers in a new study of 35 healthy families published in The Journal of Neuroscience this week have found that the brain’s corticolimbic system, responsible for the regulation of emotion—and associated with the manifestation of depressive symptoms—is more likely to be passed down from mother to daughter than from mother to son or father to child. This finding, which supports past evidence from animal research and clinical studies on depression, could provide a better understanding of the role genetics play in mood disorders and other conditions, allowing better identification of at-risk groups and preventive measures. “Our study’s uniqueness,” says lead author Fumiko Hoeft, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, “is that we’re the first one to get the whole family and scan both parents and offspring to look at how similar their brain networks are. We can tell, even though the genetics are more complicated than we originally thought, who we got our eye color from. And we joke about inheriting stubbornness or organization—but we’ve never actually seen that in human brain networks before. [This research] was a proof of impact, of using a new design that has significant potential.” 
 
 Hoeft cites Dr. Seuss’s children’s book Horton Hatches the Egg—in which an elephant sits on a bird’s egg in lieu of its actual mother and a hybrid elephant–bird ends up hatching—as a cartoonish example of the inspiration for this research. The forces of both nature and nurture are at play. “What’s relevant is that it shows the profound influence of prenatal impact on offspring, which we often forget,” Hoeft adds. “Prenatal input is considered in the most severe cases, like alcohol and smoking. But it happens in everyone. A mom being stressed has an impact on her child’s outcome.” 
 
 The finding is particularly relevant in light of the recommendations issued today by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which include the screening of pregnant women and new mothers for depression. Although this recommendation is primarily a response to concerns about the role of the “nurture” side of the equation, Hoeft seeks to unravel how biology plays its part as well. 
 
 Hoeft and her team took MRI brain scans of each family member in the study—all participants were healthy and none had been diagnosed with depression—and examined voxels, or discrete units of volume, in the corticolimbic system. They found that the association between gray matter volume in the amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus (all parts of the corticolimbic system) was much greater in mother–daughter pairings than in any other parent–offspring pairing, which, in turn, may suggest a significant female-specific maternal transmission pattern in mood disorders like depression. “These results are truly interesting and exciting,” says Geneviève Piché, a professor in the department of psychoeducation and psychology at the Université du Québec en Outaouais who has studied a different aspect of the intergenerational transmission of depression, particularly the impact of environmental factors such as parental care and punitive behavior. “But we must remain cautious when we interpret these results,” she says. “For one, only 35 families were studied, and these were 35 healthy families. We cannot be certain that these results can be generalized to depressed families, per se. We’ll have to wait for future studies on depressed mothers and see if we get similar results.” 
 
 And, as Hoeft notes, whereas the study does show intergenerational transmission patterns, it does not differentiate between the type of influence at hand: genetic, prenatal or postnatal impacts or some combination of the three could be responsible. “It’s not just one factor, it’s an accumulation of many risk factors that play a role or cause a child to develop depressive symptoms,” Piché adds. Hoeft’s team intends to address this limitation in a new study by examining MRI scans of parents and children in families that used different forms of in vitro fertilization. 
 
 The current study opens doors for future research as well. Hoeft is particularly excited about potentially applying this study’s design not only to other mental health conditions, such as autism, but also to forming a better understanding of our addiction and reward systems and even our language abilities (differentiating, for instance, between language, an innate ability that has existed throughout human history and presumably embedded in our genetics, and reading, a relatively far newer skill). 
 
 “And these results are also interesting from a preventive point of view,” Piché says, “because in the future it may help us identify and target girls that will be at higher risk of disorders like depression, and then be able to possibly prevent the development of depressive symptoms.” ||||| A study of 35 families led by a UC San Francisco psychiatric researcher showed for the first time that the structure of the brain circuitry known as the corticolimbic system is more likely to be passed down from mothers to daughters than from mothers to sons or from fathers to children of either gender. 
 
 The corticolimbic system governs emotional regulation and processing and plays a role in mood disorders, including depression. 
 
 A large body of human clinical research indicates a strong association in depression between mothers and daughters, while many previous animal studies have shown that female offspring are more likely than males to show changes in emotion-associated brain structures in response to maternal prenatal stress. Until now, however, there have been few studies that attempted to link the two streams of research, said lead author Fumiko Hoeft, MD, PhD, a UCSF associate professor of psychiatry. 
 
 The finding does not mean that mothers are necessarily responsible for their daughters' depression, Hoeft said. "Many factors play a role in depression – genes that are not inherited from the mother, social environment and life experiences, to name only three. Mother-daughter transmission is just one piece of it. 
 
 "But this is the first study to bridge animal and human clinical research and show a possible matrilineal transmission of human corticolimbic circuitry, which has been implicated in depression, by scanning both parents and offspring," said Hoeft, who directs the UCSF Hoeft Laboratory for Educational Neuroscience. “It opens the door to a whole new avenue of research looking at intergenerational transmission patterns in the human brain.” 
 
 The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience on Jan. 27. 
 
 Brain Structures in Healthy Families 
 
 Fumiko Hoeft, MD, PhD 
 
 The corticolimbic system includes the amygdala, hippocampus, anterior cingulate cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Hoeft and her research team used non-invasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure grey matter volume (GMV) in the corticolimbic systems of parents and their biological offspring from 35 healthy families. None of the family members were diagnosed with depression. The association between mothers' and daughters' corticolimbic GMV was significantly greater than that between mothers and sons, fathers and sons, and fathers and daughters. 
 
 The study is the first to use MRI in both parents and their children to study intergenerational transmission of the pattern of brain structures, said Hoeft. “This gives us a potential new tool to better understand depression and other neuropsychiatric conditions, as most conditions seem to show intergenerational transmission patterns,” she said. “Anxiety, autism, addiction, schizophrenia, dyslexia, you name it – brain patterns inherited from both mothers and fathers have an impact on just about all of them.” 
 
 Studying Maternal Influence in IVF 
 
 One limitation of the study, said Hoeft, is that it does not differentiate between the potential effects of genetics, prenatal conditions and postnatal conditions on the inheritance of brain structures. She hopes that a new study funded by the UCSF Academic Senate, which is just getting under way, will address that shortcoming. 
 
 Hoeft and her team will use MRI to study brain structures in families where children have been conceived and delivered using different types of in vitro fertilization (IVF). 
 
 The researchers will image the brains of parents and children in families where the birth mother was implanted with a donor egg; families where a surrogate was implanted with the biological mother's egg; and families where the mother was implanted with her own fertilized egg in a procedure known as homologous IVF. 
 
 "With donor eggs, there is no maternal genetic input, but there is maternal prenatal and postnatal influence," Hoeft explained. "In gestational surrogacy, there is genetic and postnatal input from the biological mother, but no prenatal input. With homologous IVF, there are maternal genetic, prenatal and postnatal influences. Comparison of these three groups allows us to control for potential effects of the IVF procedure itself.” 
 
 By studying these different family groups, she said, “we will for the very first time be able to examine, and hopefully distinguish between, the effects of genetics, prenatal environment and postnatal environment on brain function, structure, and cognitive function." 
 
 While Hoeft and her team are funded to look at corticolimbic circuitry, "this does not preclude our looking at other brain systems," she said. "We will be examining the language network, the reward system and different networks implicated in psychosis. We will cast a wide net, gain a lot of information and maximize this fantastic opportunity." 
 
 Other authors of the current study are Roeland Hancock, PhD, and Tony Yang, MD, PhD, of UCSF; Bun Yamagata, MD, PhD, and Masaru Mimura, MD, PhD, of Keio University School of Medicine, Tokyo, Japan; Kou Murayama, PhD, of the University of Reading, Reading, UK; Jessica Black, PhD, of Boston College; and Allan Reiss, MD, of Stanford University. 
 
 The study was supported by funds from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, the UCSF Dyslexia Center, a UCSF Academic Senate award, a UCSF-CCC Neuroscience Fellowship and the Dennis & Shannon Wong – DSEA ’88 Foundation. 
 
 UCSF is a leading university dedicated to transforming health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. Founded in 1864 as a medical college, UCSF now includes top-ranked graduate schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy; a graduate division with world-renowned programs in the biological sciences, a preeminent biomedical research enterprise and top-tier hospitals, UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals.
– Always hoped you're mom's favorite? A new study out of Purdue University finds that the favorite child is actually more prone to be depressed as an adult, researchers report in the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences. Looking at 725 adult children from 309 families in the Within-Family Differences Study—a longitudinal project documenting various aspects of relationships between parents and their adult children—they say that depressive symptoms were most common in the adult children who claimed to be emotionally closer to their mother than their siblings, reports Medical News Today. That also held true for "the children with whom their mothers had the greatest conflict, and in whom the mothers were most disappointed," write the authors. Interestingly, the study found no difference between male and female children, but it did find a racial disparity, notes Medical Daily. Adult black children felt their mother's disappointment more acutely than their white counterparts. Researchers hypothesize that sibling rivalry may be behind the depression, meaning more attention or support from mom doesn't necessarily beat out the negative attention from jealous siblings. Or that the favorites are more often asked to help the aging mother, which is its own source of stress. (The adult children in the study had mothers who were 65 to 75 when interviewed.) And yet a third possibility is posed by Bustle: A mother's attention may naturally drift toward the weakest or most sensitive child, thus her favoritism doesn't necessarily cause depression. Researchers plan to look at whether similar results play out with fathers, and whether it's possible to predict favoritism. (One study finds that young kids in religious households are less willing to share stickers.)