Developmental psychobiology最新文献

Early language is shaped by parent–child interactions and has been examined in relation to maternal psychopathology and parenting stress. Minimal work has examined the relation between maternal emotion dysregulation and toddler vocabulary development. This longitudinal study examined associations between maternal emotion dysregulation prenatally, maternal everyday stress at 7 months postpartum, and toddler vocabulary at 18 months. Data were collected from 289 typically developing, monolingual children (54% female) and their mothers (63% White and non-Hispanic; 56% held a college degree). During pregnancy, maternal emotion dysregulation was measured via self-report and resting respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). Mothers completed questionnaires about their perceived everyday stress and their child's vocabulary at 7 and 18 months postpartum, respectively. Path analysis revealed that expectant mothers’ self-reported emotion dysregulation was indirectly associated with toddlers’ expressive vocabulary via their level of postpartum perceived everyday stress. In addition, prenatal maternal resting RSA directly predicted toddlers’ expressive vocabulary size. These findings yield insights into the mechanisms by which perinatal mental health may shape early language development and highlight the potential utility of interventions targeting emotion dysregulation during pregnancy.

Exercise can be leveraged as an important tool to improve neural and psychological health, either on its own or to bolster the efficacy of evidence-based treatment modalities. Research in both humans and animal models shows that positive experiences, such as exercise, promote neuroprotection while, in contrast, aversive experiences, particularly those in early development, are often neurologically and psychologically disruptive. In the current study, we employed a preclinical model to investigate the therapeutic benefits of exercise on gene expression in the brains of adult rats. Long Evans rats were exposed to maltreatment stress or nurturing care during infancy, with some rats later given voluntary running wheels as an aerobic exercise intervention from Postnatal Days 70 to 90. Our results showed that irisin gene expression, which promotes neuroprotection, was differentially affected by exercise and early exposure to stress. We add to a rapidly growing area of research on the neuroprotective benefits of exercise and shed light on important molecular mechanisms that may affect the efficacy of exercise in different individuals.

Parenting that is warm and supportive has been consistently linked to better emotion regulation in children, but less is known about this association in adolescents. Adolescence is thought to be an important period for emotion regulation development given that it coincides with the emergence of mental health issues. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) is a measure of parasympathetic regulation linked to emotion and behavior regulation. Despite the well-documented links between parenting practices and emotion regulation, and between RSA and emotion regulation, few studies have focused on the association between positive parenting and adolescent RSA or included both mothers and fathers. The current study analyzed the influence of warm parenting throughout adolescence (ages 10–16) on basal RSA at age 17 in 229 Mexican-origin youths. Latent-growth curve models were used to analyze associations between maternal and paternal warmth and baseline RSA. Changes in maternal, but not paternal, warmth from age 10 to 16 were related to youths’ basal RSA at age 17. Specifically, youths who perceived increasing (or less decreasing) maternal warmth across adolescence had higher basal RSA. This finding suggests that positive maternal parenting experiences during adolescence “get under the skin” to enhance parasympathetic functioning that supports youths’ emotion regulation capacities.

Object permanence allows infants to interact successfully with objects in the environment. What happens in the human infant brain when objects move in and out of sight? This study used high-density electroencephalography (hdEEG) to record induced oscillatory brain activities in 29 locomotor infants before, during, and after occlusion of a moving object traveling at different speeds. Temporal spectral evolution (TSE) showed that before and after the occlusion event, event-related synchronized (ERS) brain activity was observed, whereas event-related desynchronized (ERD) activity was detected when the car was hidden behind the occluder. Both synchronized and desynchronized brain activities were found in the gamma frequency band (>30 Hz) in visual areas. Coherence connectivity analysis showed significant cluster differences before and during occlusion, during and after occlusion, and before and after occlusion in the gamma (30–150 Hz) and theta range (4–7 Hz) in several brain sources of interest. It was concluded that locomotor infants between 8.5 and 12 months of age show high-frequency brain oscillations while perceiving a moving object going temporarily out of sight. The significant cluster differences indicate the beginning of specialized connectivity networks, where object permanence is processed within dedicated visual, parietal, and central areas along the dorsal processing stream.

Auditory evoked potential-age (AEP-age) is proposed to index auditory maturation and has been found to predict language skills in children with and without a language disorder. However, reporting average effects using linear regression does not fully capitalize on the potential of AEP-age to estimate individual differences in young children. This study used a quantile regression approach to examine the predictive utility of AEP-age for 105 typical and neurodiverse 7–10-year-old children (61 males; 44 females; largely monolingual English) with varying language skills without creating subgroups. Although linear regression did not find an association between AEP-age and language skills, the quantile model added specificity by revealing differential associations. AEP-age was only related to language skills for children at around the median point of the language continuum, but, not for those at the lowest or highest end of the language distribution. Overall, the quantile regression methodology provides us with the flexibility of understanding how AEP-age is related to different language abilities.

Difficulties with emotion regulation have been documented in individuals with eating and internalizing disorders. However, there is limited research examining the cognitive processes underlying these difficulties. Using a dimensional approach, the current study examined the link between the behavioral and neural correlates of response inhibition, disordered eating, and internalizing symptoms in a community sample of preadolescents. A total of 50 children (M age = 10.9 years; 58% male) completed an emotion Go/No-Go task, while ERP components were recorded, as well as self-report measures of disordered eating and internalizing symptoms. In addition, children completed an emotion recognition task to establish whether there were fundamental differences in emotion recognition across high and low levels of disordered eating and internalizing symptoms. Increased disordered eating was associated with increased mean P3-NoGo amplitudes when inhibiting responses to happy facial expressions, as well as poorer recognition of happy faces. These associations were not found for internalizing symptoms. Our findings suggest an early disruption in response inhibition, specifically for happy emotional expressions, may be relevant to the development of disordered eating behaviors in preadolescence.