Abstract: Maternal anxiety has become increasingly prevalent in contemporary parenting contexts; however, the mechanisms through which it drives and maintains overprotective behavior still lack a systematic theoretical explanation. To address this gap, the present review adopts a clinical perspective on maternal anxiety and synthesizes evidence from clinical, developmental, and neuroscientific research to propose an innovative “emotional-cognitive-behavioral closed-loop model” explaining the mechanisms underlying overprotective behavior. This model not only deepens our understanding of the relationship between maternal anxiety and parenting behavior but also offers new directions for theoretical innovation in integrated psychological, neural, and social interventions.
The model proposes that maternal anxiety drives overprotective behavior through three interacting psychological components, rather than a simple linear causal chain. First, at the emotional level, maternal anxiety may trigger threat overamplification and emotional sensitivity dysregulation, causing individuals with maternal anxiety to perceive child distress or routine exploration as significant dangers. Second, at the cognitive level, individuals with maternal anxiety may display attentional bias toward threat cues and engage in catastrophic interpretation of ambiguous situations, while their cognitive reappraisal capacity may become impaired, potentially leading them to justify intrusive interventions as necessary protection. Third, at the behavioral level, overprotective actions (e.g., immediate soothing, activity restriction) produce rapid but temporary anxiety relief. Crucially, this relief functions may as a negative reinforcement signal, increasing the likelihood that overprotection will be repeated in similar future situations. These three levels may continuously feed back into each other: emotional amplification biases cognition, cognitive distortions justify more extreme protection, and behavioral relief reinforces both emotional and cognitive patterns, forming a self-perpetuating psychological closed loop.
At the neural level, the model further attempts to elucidate how maternal anxiety drives overprotective behavior through three key pathways—threat amplification, cognitive dysregulation, and reward reinforcement—thereby achieving cross-level integration. Emotional triggering serves as the starting point of the model. Hyperactivation and heightened vigilance of the amygdala (AMY) correspond to the “emotional response” component of the closed loop, providing the initial driving force for the entire circuit. The connection between the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the AMY plays a key role in mediating fear and anxiety-like behaviors. Reduced regulatory function of the mPFC and its abnormal connectivity with the AMY lead to threat assessment bias and catastrophic thinking, which correspond to the “cognitive bias” component of the loop. The mPFC fails to effectively “brake”—that is, inhibitory control is weakened—resulting in amplified emotional signals that drive overprotective behavior. This altered neural functional state may lead individuals with maternal anxiety to adopt risk-avoidant decisions (e.g., early intervention or restriction) even in low-threat or uncertain situations—such as a child playing independently in a safe environment—as a preventive coping strategy. Such behaviors may eventually be marked as “effective” by the reward system (the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA)-Nucleus Accumbens (NAc) dopamine pathway) and become consolidated into habitual actions through negative reinforcement. Thus, in the neural closed loop underlying maternal anxiety-driven overprotective behavior, the VTA-NAc reward pathway serves both as a reward pathway for emotional relief and as a reinforcement mechanism for behavioral consolidation, constituting a key downstream executive node of the loop. The three nodes described above do not operate in a linear cascade but instead form a dynamic interactive network, which may ultimately trap the entire system in a vicious cycle of “anxiety-protection-transient relief-increased vulnerability to anxiety,” making overprotective behavioral patterns increasingly stable and automatic.
The formation of maternal anxiety-driven overprotective behavior does not stem from a single factor but may result from the dynamic coupling of psychological, neural, and social dimensions. Through a systematic review and synthesis of existing literature, this paper proposes an “emotional-cognitive-behavioral closed-loop model”, replacing fragmented factor-based accounts with a dynamic systems perspective. In addition, the model introduces “anxiety relief as reward” via negative reinforcement—a mechanism adapted from addiction and avoidance research—to explain why overprotective behavior becomes habitual and resistant to change, rather than merely attributing it to cognitive errors. Finally, it attempts to achieve cross-level integration by mapping psychological and neural levels onto each other, enabling future studies to test causal pathways rather than mere correlations. In conclusion, this review does not merely summarize existing knowledge but provides a mechanistic, integrative, and actionable theoretical framework that explains the formation, maintenance, and potential impact of maternal anxiety-driven overprotective parenting, thereby offering new directions for both basic research and clinical translation.

Key words: maternal anxiety, overprotection, emotion-cognition-behavior closed loop, neural mechanisms