Developmental psychobiology最新文献

Parent–child synchrony, or coordination of behavioral, affective, and physiological responding during dyadic interactions, is associated with numerous positive child outcomes. Research considering how parental psychopathology influences synchrony, however, has failed to assess cooccurring parenting behaviors and styles that may influence synchrony. The current study assessed how parental history of depressive disorders, parenting styles and behaviors, and child behaviors during a dyadic interaction influence parent–child adrenocortical synchrony (PCAS). Participants included 40 parent–child dyads with children aged between 8 and 13 years (M_age = 10 years), with about half (47%) of parents meeting criteria for lifetime depressive disorders. Parent and child cortisol levels were measured before, during, and after children completed a challenging task with parents observing nearby. Dyads completed questionnaire measures of parenting styles, and video recordings were coded to assess parent and child behaviors during the task. Using multilevel regression analyses, we found that both parent- and child-reported greater parental firmness were associated with negative PCAS. Furthermore, fewer child help-seeking behaviors during the challenging task were associated with negative PCAS. Parental history of depressive disorders, however, did not influence PCAS. These results suggest that parent and child behaviors may influence the direction and magnitude of PCAS during middle childhood over and above parental psychopathology.

Cumulative family stress (cumulative FS), characterized by mother-reported co-occurring stressors in a family context, may be biologically embedded through DNA methylation (DNAm) and contribute to later health outcomes, including psychopathology. To illuminate tissue specificity in association with cumulative FS across two accessible tissues, we compared epigenome-wide DNAm associations in buccal epithelial cells (BECs; n = 218) and peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs; n = 51) from 7- to 13-year-old children in Canada, accounting for sex, age, predicted cell-type proportion, and genetic ancestry. We found that higher levels of cumulative FS were associated with DNAm at seven sites, primarily in stress- and immune-related genes, only in PBMCs but not in BECs. Matched tissue samples (n = 50) also indicated limited cross-tissue concordance. These associations were partly explained by negative but not positive mother–child relationship. Our findings suggested that PBMC DNAm can be used as a marker for biological embedding of cumulative FS and highlighted cross-tissue specificity of the associations of DNAm with cumulative FS.

Suor, J. H., R. Mueller, S. A. Shankman, and K. L. Burkhouse. 2025. “Exploring Neural Markers of Reward and Loss Processing and Problematic Parenting Styles Among Mothers With and Without Histories of Depression.” Developmental Psychobiology 67, no. 5: e70083. https://doi.org/10.1002/dev.70083.

In the originally published version, the title was incorrectly rendered as “Exploring Neural Markers of Reward and Loss Processing and Problematic Parenting Styles A Mothers With and Without Histories of Depression.”

The correct title is “Exploring Neural Markers of Reward and Loss Processing and Problematic Parenting Styles Among Mothers With and Without Histories of Depression.”

The online version has been corrected accordingly.

We apologize for this error.

This study examined the effects of two emotion regulation (ER) strategies: reappraisal and distraction on the late positive potential (LPP) in a sample of Latinx children (n = 78, ages 8–11, 50% girls) across sadness, fear, and happiness contexts. We aimed to expand our understanding of ER strategies by (1) examining distraction as a regulatory strategy, (2) assessing discrete emotional contexts rather than aggregating negative emotions, and (3) including Latinx children, an underrepresented demographic in neuroscience and developmental work. Results showed that sadness elicited larger LPP amplitudes than other emotions, highlighting sadness as particularly salient emotion. ER strategies effectively reduced LPP amplitudes for sadness in the early processing window (300–700 ms) but failed to sustain this effect over time (700–3500 ms) and even appeared to intensify neural responses to sadness in later windows, suggesting developmental limitations in children's ability to maintain ER strategies across extended periods. Our findings add to existing work and offer novel and needed evidence of the discrete emotion-dependent effects of ER strategies on the LPP in children.

The pre-locomotor version of the Laboratory Temperament Assessment Battery (Lab-TAB) provides one of the most widely used observational measures of fear based on the infant's reactivity to a series of four novel masks. Resulting indicators of facial and bodily fear intensity, as well as latency to exhibit a fearful response, have been associated with maternal reports of infant fear as well as frontal electroencephalography (EEG) reactivity. While these measures have been used extensively since the introduction of Lab-TAB, they are typically averaged across the procedure, and differences between the four mask stimuli have not been sufficiently examined. This study addressed this gap in research by examining specific infant reactions, both behaviorally and from a neurophysiological standpoint, to each presentation of the fear-provoking stimuli to better understand factors that impact the expression of fear during this task. Our findings indicated significant differences in behavioral observations of distress and regulation, with the final/fourth mask eliciting stronger reactions; however, there were no such differences in the infants’ neurophysiological response. Additionally, neither the fear subscale of the Infant Behavior Questionnaire—Revised (IBQ-R) nor the Negative Emotionality factor was predictive of infant's neurophysiological changes, distress, or regulation during the episode until examining subgroups based on age or sex. Further analyses of frontal alpha asymmetry across masks indicated that infants may become attuned to these stimuli over the course of the task, leading to less predictive utility than earlier neurophysiological markers. Results also revealed that older infants had differing neurophysiological reactions across the paradigm, whereas no significant differences were noted for younger infants. Finally, differences based on infant sex emerged with regard to temperament predictors of asymmetry. Implications of the discrepancy between results for the EEG asymmetry markers and observed distress/regulation in trial comparisons are discussed.

The current study used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate whether and how individual differences in positive social engagement among 5-month-old (N = 109; N = 35 final sample) infants relate to variability in functional connectivity in the human brain's Default-Mode Network (DMN). Neuroimaging results showed that on average infants displayed greater functional connectivity in the right than in the left hemisphere of the DMN, adding to prior work indicating faster connectivity development in the right hemisphere. Results did not show any positive associations between our preregistered measures of positive social engagement and functional connectivity in the DMN. However, an additional analysis revealed that higher levels of infants’ smiling and laughter during daily social interactions with their caregivers positively predicted DMN functional connectivity in the left hemisphere. This suggests that individual differences in connectivity in a long-range brain network implicated in a host of social and cognitive functions are associated with some aspects of infants’ positive social-interactive behaviors.