Emotion Processing:Risk for Psychopathology in Children

描述(申请人提供)：超过150万名儿童 去年，美国虐待儿童的受害者被证实为虐待儿童。一 令人担忧的是，虽然我们已经发现了更高的行为比率 这些儿童中与这种创伤经历相关的障碍， 将这些儿童的情感体验与后者联系起来的机制 精神病理学的发展在很大程度上仍然是未知的。了解 经验改变开发监管系统的过程可能会提供 对精神病理学发展的洞察。拟议的研究将 儿童认知电生理差异的特征 对无法从外显行为反应中观察到的情绪的处理 独自一人。我建议确定虐待儿童是否以及如何影响儿童的 通过以下方式对情感信息进行感知处理： (1)测量受虐待儿童对听觉情感线索的敏感性。 事件相关电位(ERPS)将记录儿童时期的信息处理 听一听有效的带电单词，以两种方式呈现。 2)分离情绪对受虐待儿童注意的影响 过程中，事件相关电位将被用来确定情绪线索对 儿童注意控制与注意资源分配的研究 对面部表情和情绪声音的反应。 (三)确定虐待是否影响儿童的知觉组织 情感信息。儿童会进行知觉归类 对已被数字混合的情感面部表情的判断 其他情绪。 (4)评价不同受虐待儿童在情感计时上的差异。 由于情绪的传递非常迅速，大多数需要 行为反应可能对信息的时间方面不敏感 正在处理。这项实验将测量受虐待儿童对 动态展开关于面部表情的感知信息 依赖于反应时测量。 综上所述，这些研究将扩大对 受虐待儿童的精神病理学研究 异常体验影响后续体验的认知过程 情感功能。此外，还研究了虐待的影响 这种方式将有助于阐明促进发展的机制 情绪系统的组织。因为情感调节失调是常见的 所以许多形式的儿童精神病理学，产生关于 与虐待儿童行为相关的神经行为过程可能 帮助阐明适应性和非适应性发展的途径。

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.