Neuroimaging and attachment in Children-at-Risk

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The integration children-at-risk is one of the societal tasks in Germany with top priority. Moreover children-at-risk run an increased risk of social disintegration, with lower educational success, violence, and psychosomatic and psychological disorders such as increased drug use especially in adolescence as a consequence. These consequences are considered to be among others a result of emotional neglect or experiences of severe traumatization in early childhood. In the last few years several studies in the area of empirical attachment research have illuminated facts that affect the cognitive-affective and social development of children. They researched among others the development of attachment patterns in children in early childhood. The current application intends to pick up this thread and investigate children with insecure-disorganized attachment style with regard to neural correlates of emotional reactions to attachment-relevant stimuli. Since disorganized attached elementary school children show augmented social and aggressive problems, the hypothesis is tested if these disorganized attached children experience ostracism more intensively than securely attached children.For this an interdisciplinary study is applied for to test disorganized attached children in comparison to securely attached children with respect to structural and functional abnormalities by means of structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI/fMRI). The study aims at investigating the relationship between early childhood experiences, individual attachment patterns and neurobiological correlates.