Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

"Major depressive disorder (MDD) is considered one of the most burdensome medical conditions in Canada. Given that the onset of MDD in youth is often preceded by internalizing and externalizing symptoms, the development of preventative interventions that reduce these symptoms in at-risk youth is critical. Offspring of parents with MDD are at higher risk of later developing MDD due in part to a stressful home environment. The Reducing Unwanted Stress in the Home (RUSH) program has been developed to reduce stress exposure in children of parents with affective disorders by improving structure in the home and parent-child interactions. We propose a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to examine whether the RUSH program decreases internalizing and externalizing symptoms in offspring of parents with MDD. We will also examine whether this association is mediated by attention to emotional stimuli in an emotional face perception task. Individuals with MDD or at high-risk for MDD show blunted neural responses to positive and negative emotional stimuli as measured by the Late Positive Potential (LPP), a pattern of neural activity reflecting attention to motivationally salient stimuli measured using electroencephalography (EEG). Given that the magnitude of the LPP is affected by stress, we hypothesize that a larger LPP in response to faces with expressions of positive but not negative valence will mediate the relationship between participation in the RUSH program and decreases in internalizing and externalizing symptoms in offspring. The proposed project would assess the efficacy of the RUSH program, thus and thus address the current lack of preventative interventions in use targeting the risk factor of stressful home environment experienced by children of parents with MDD."