Search

Objective: Early life adversity (ELA) has shown to have negative impacts on mental health. One possible mechanism is through alterations in neural emotion processing. We sought to characterize how multiple indices of ELA were related to naturalistic neural socio-emotional processing., Method: In 521 5-15-year-old participants from the Healthy Brain Network Biobank, we identified scenes that elicited activation of the Default Mode Network (DMN), Ventral Attention Network (VAN), Cingulo-Opercular Network (CON) and amygdala, all of which are networks shown to be associated with ELA. We used linear regression to examine associations between activation and ELA: negative parenting, social status, financial insecurity, neighborhood disadvantage, negative experiences, and parent psychopathology., Results: We found DMN, VAN, CON and amygdala activation during sad/emotional, bonding, action, conflict, sad, or fearful scenes. Greater inconsistent discipline was associated with greater VAN activation during sad or emotional scenes., Conclusion: Findings suggest that the DMN, VAN, CON networks and the amygdala support socio-emotional processing consistent with prior literature. Individuals who experienced inconsistent discipline may have greater sensitivity to parent-child separation signals. Since no other ELA-activation associations were found, it is possible that unpredictability may be more strongly associated with complex neural emotion processing than socio-economic status or negative life events., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

The field of adult neuroimaging relies on well-established principles in research design, imaging sequences, processing pipelines, as well as safety and data collection protocols. The field of infant magnetic resonance imaging, by comparison, is a young field with tremendous scientific potential but continuously evolving standards. The present article aims to initiate a constructive dialog between researchers who grapple with the challenges and inherent limitations of a nascent field and reviewers who evaluate their work. We address 20 questions that researchers commonly receive from research ethics boards, grant, and manuscript reviewers related to infant neuroimaging data collection, safety protocols, study planning, imaging sequences, decisions related to software and hardware, and data processing and sharing, while acknowledging both the accomplishments of the field and areas of much needed future advancements. This article reflects the cumulative knowledge of experts in the FIT'NG community and can act as a resource for both researchers and reviewers alike seeking a deeper understanding of the standards and tradeoffs involved in infant neuroimaging., (Copyright © 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Parent-child synchrony-parent-child interaction patterns characterized by contingent social responding, mutual responsivity, and co-regulation-has been robustly associated with adaptive child outcomes. Synchrony has been investigated in both behavioral and biological frameworks. While it has been demonstrated that adversity can influence behavioral parent-child synchrony, the neural mechanisms by which this disruption occurs are understudied. The current study examined the association between adversity, parent-child behavioral synchrony, and parent-child neural synchrony across lateral prefrontal cortical regions using functional near-infrared spectroscopy hyperscanning during a parent-child interaction task that included a mild stress induction followed by a recovery period. Participants included 115 children (ages 4-5) and their primary caregivers. Parent-child behavioral synchrony was quantified as the amount time the dyad was synchronous (e.g., reciprocal communication, coordinated behaviors) during the interaction task. Parent-child neural synchrony was examined as the hemodynamic concordance between parent and child lateral PFC activation. Adversity was examined across two, empirically-derived domains: sociodemographic risk (e.g., family income) and familial risk (e.g., household chaos). Adversity, across domains, was associated with decreased parent-child behavioral synchrony across task conditions. Sociodemographic risk was associated with decreased parent-child neural synchrony in the context of experimentally-induced stress. These findings link adversity to decreased parent-child behavioral and neural synchrony., (Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

High Temperamental Negative Affectivity in early childhood has been found to predict later emotion dysregulation. While much work has been conducted to separately probe bio-behavioral systems associated with Negative Affectivity, very little work has examined the relations among multiple systems across age. In this study, we use multi-modal methods to index neurobiological systems associated with Negative Affectivity in 53 4-7-year-old children. Prefrontal activation during emotion regulation was measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy over the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) while children played a game designed to elicit frustration in Social (Happy and Angry faces) and Nonsocial contexts. Gaze behaviors while free-viewing Happy and Angry faces were also measured. Finally, Negative Affectivity was indexed using a score composite based on factor analysis of parent-reported temperament. Using mixed-effects linear models, we found an age-dependent association between Negative Affectivity and both PFC activation during frustration and fixation duration on the mouth area of Happy faces, such that older children high in Negative Affectivity spent less time looking at the mouths of Happy faces and had lower PFC activation in response to frustration (ps<0.034). These results provide further insight to how Negative Affectivity may be associated with changes in affective neurobiological systems across early childhood., (Copyright © 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Stressful experiences are linked to neurodevelopment. There is growing interest in the role of stress in the connectivity between the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a circuit that subserves automatic emotion regulation. However, the specific timing and mechanisms that underlie the association between stress and amygdala-mPFC connectivity are unclear. Many factors, including variations in fetal exposure to maternal stress, appear to affect early developing brain circuitry. However, few studies have examined the associations of stress and amygdala-mPFC connectivity in early life, when the brain is most plastic and sensitive to environmental influence. In this longitudinal pilot study, we characterized the association between prenatal stress and amygdala-mPFC connectivity in young infants (approximately age 5 weeks). A final sample of 33 women who provided data on preconception and prenatal stress during their pregnancy returned with their offspring for a magnetic resonance imaging scan session, which enabled us to characterize amygdala-mPFC structural and functional connectivity as a function of prenatal stress. Increased prenatal stress was associated with decreased functional connectivity and increased structural connectivity between the amygdala and mPFC. These results provide insight into the influence of prenatal maternal stress on the early development of this critical regulatory circuitry., (Copyright © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Individual differences in temperament have been theorized to be supported by differential recruitment of key neural regions, resulting in the distinct patterns of behavior observed throughout life. Although a compelling model, its rigorous and systematic testing is lacking, particularly within the heightened neuroplasticity of early childhood. The current study tested a model of the link between temperament, the brain, and behavior for cognitive flexibility in a sample of 4-5-year-old children (N = 123) using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to assess prefrontal cortex (PFC) activation. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to explore the link between survey reports of temperamental effortful control, and both performance-based and neuroimaging measures of cognitive flexibility. Results indicated that greater parent-reported temperamental effortful control was associated with better performance on a cognitive flexibility task, and less activation of the DLPFC in preschoolers. These findings support the theorized model of the interrelatedness between temperamental tendencies, behavior, and brain activation and suggest that better temperamentally regulated children use the DLPFC more efficiently for cognitive flexibility., (Copyright © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Children from lower-SES families exhibit smaller hippocampal volume than do their higher-SES peers. Few studies, however, have compared hippocampal developmental trajectories as a function of SES. Thus, it is unclear whether initial rank-order stability is preserved, or whether volumes diverge/converge over the course of adolescence. In a sample of 101 girls ages 10-24 years, we examined the longitudinal association between family income and parental education, proxies for SES, and changes in hippocampal volume. Hippocampal volume was obtained using MRI; using mixed modeling, we examined the effects of income and education on hippocampal volume across age. As expected, changes in volume were non-linear across development. Further, trajectories diverged in mid-adolescence, with lower-income girls exhibiting reductions in hippocampal volume. Maximal income-related differences were observed at 18 years, and trajectories converged thereafter. This interaction remained significant when accounting for maternal hippocampal volume, suggesting a unique contribution of environment over potential heritable differences. In contrast, the association between parental education and offspring hippocampal volume appeared to be stable across adolescence, with higher levels of parental education predicting consistently larger hippocampal volume. These findings constitute preliminary evidence that girls from lower-income homes exhibit unique trajectories of hippocampal growth, with differences most evident in late adolescence., (Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)