Neuroimaging and attachment in Children-at-Risk

弱势儿童融入社会是德国的当务之急。此外，处于危险中的儿童面临着更大的社会解体风险，其结果是教育成就率较低、暴力以及心身和心理障碍，如吸毒增加，特别是在青少年时期。除其他外，这些后果被认为是情绪疏忽或儿童早期遭受严重创伤的结果。在过去的几年里，在经验依恋研究领域的几项研究阐明了影响儿童认知、情感和社会发展的事实。除了其他研究外，他们还研究了儿童早期依恋模式的发展。目前的应用程序打算抓住这一线索，调查患有不安全-混乱依恋风格的儿童对依恋相关刺激的情绪反应的神经相关性。由于无组织依恋儿童表现出社交和攻击性问题的增加，假设检验这些无组织依恋儿童是否比安全依恋儿童经历更强烈的排斥。为此，应用一项跨学科研究，通过结构和功能磁共振成像(sMRI/fMRI)的方法，比较无组织依恋儿童和安全依恋儿童的结构和功能异常。本研究旨在探讨儿童早期体验、个体依恋模式和神经生物学相关因素之间的关系。

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.