Emotion Processing:Risk for Psychopathology in Children

描述（由申请人提供）：超过150万儿童 去年在美国被证实的虐待儿童的受害者。一 令人担忧的是，虽然我们已经确定了一个高比例的行为， 与这些儿童的这种创伤经历有关的疾病， 将这些孩子的情感体验与后来的 精神病理学的发展仍然是未知的。了解 经验改变发展中的监管制度的过程可能提供 对精神病理学发展的深刻见解拟议的研究将 表征儿童认知电生理差异 无法从明显的行为反应中观察到的情绪处理 一个人我建议确定虐待儿童是否以及如何影响儿童的健康 情感信息的感知处理： (1)测量受虐待儿童对听觉情感线索的敏感度。 事件相关电位（ERPS）将记录儿童的信息处理过程 听有效充电的话，提出了二分法。 2)情绪对被虐待儿童注意的影响 过程中，ERP将被用来确定情绪线索的影响， 注意控制与注意资源分配 对面部表情和情绪声音的反应。 (3)确定虐待是否影响儿童的知觉组织 情感信息。儿童会进行感性的归类 对面部表情的情感判断， 其他情绪。 (4)评估受虐待儿童的情感测时差异。 由于情感的传递发生得非常快，大多数需要 行为反应可能对信息的时间方面不敏感 处理.这个实验将测量受虐待儿童对 动态地展开关于面部表情的感知信息， 依赖于反应时间测量。 总之，这些研究将扩大知识的发展， 精神病理学的虐待儿童，重点放在具体的知觉和 认知过程，通过异常的经验影响随后的 情感功能此外，研究虐待对儿童的影响， 这种方式将揭示有助于发展的机制， 情绪系统的组织。因为情感失调是常见的， 如此多的儿童精神病理学形式，关于儿童精神病理学的见解， 与受虐待儿童行为相关的神经行为过程可能 有助于阐明适应性和不适应性发展的途径。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): More than 1.5 million children were victims of substantiated child maltreatment in the United States last year. One concern is that while we have identified a heightened rate of behavioral disorders associated with such traumatic experience in these children, the mechanisms linking these children's emotional experiences with the later development of psychopathology remain largely unknown. Understanding the processes by which experience alters developing regulatory systems may provide insights into the development of psychopathology. The proposed research will characterize cognitive electrophysiological differences in children's processing of emotion that are not observable from overt behavioral responses alone. I propose to determine if and how child maltreatment affects children's perceptual processing of emotional information by: (1) Measuring maltreated children's sensitivity to auditory affective cues. Event-related potentials (ERPS) will record information processing as children listen to effectively charged words, presented dichotically. 2) Isolating the effects of emotion on maltreated children's attentional processes, ERPs will be used to determine the effect of emotional cues on children's attentional control and on attentional resource allocation in response to facial displays of emotion and emotional sounds. (3) Determining whether maltreatment affects children's perceptual organization of emotional information. Children will make perceptual categorization judgments of facial expressions of affect that have been digitally blended with other emotions. (4) Assessing differences in affective chronometry among maltreated children. Since transmission of emotion occurs very quickly, most tasks that require behavioral responses may not be sensitive to temporal aspects of information processing. This experiment will measure maltreated children's responses to dynamically unfolding perceptual information about facial expressions without reliance on reaction time measures. Taken together, these studies will extend knowledge about the development of psychopathology in maltreated children by focusing upon specific perceptual and cognitive processes through which aberrant experience affects subsequent affective functioning. In addition, studying the effects of maltreatment in this manner will shed light on the mechanisms contributing to the developmental organization of emotion systems. Because dysregulation of affect is common to so many forms of child psychopathology, insights generated with regard to the neuro-behavioral processes associated with maltreated children's behavior may help explicate pathways of both adaptive and maladaptive development.