Children's Neural Processing of the Emotional Environment: Angry Voices

 描述(由申请人提供)：与较差的儿童情绪调节有关的几个家庭因素包括儿童暴露在愤怒中。愤怒处理的个体差异可能有助于解释为什么父母间愤怒等家庭风险因素与较差的自我调节能力有关。尽管有行为学证据帮助我们了解儿童对愤怒的敏感性和知识，但唯一涉及愤怒神经处理的研究是在成年人身上进行的，在少数情况下是在婴儿身上进行的。这个应用程序旨在了解5岁和6岁的儿童如何在神经水平上处理愤怒的韵律。使用功能磁共振成像技术研究了儿童在听到愤怒、悲伤、快乐和中性韵律时的大脑激活模式。此外，这个项目通过比较儿童母亲或不熟悉的女性所说的韵律，来检验情感韵律，尤其是愤怒韵律的处理是否受到儿童与说话者的熟悉程度的影响。该项目的发现将通过包括对幼儿的研究来为基础情感神经科学提供信息，并将为后续研究典型儿童和处于危险中的儿童在愤怒韵律加工过程中的个体差异提供一种方法。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Several of the family factors that are associated with poorer child emotion regulation involve a child's exposure to anger. Individual differences in anger processing may help to explain why family risk factors such as inter- parental anger are associated with poorer self-regulation. Although there is behavioral evidence that helps us understand children's sensitivity to and knowledge of anger, the only research involving neural processing of anger has been done with adults or in a few cases with infants. This application is aimed at understanding how children, ages 5 and 6 years, process angry prosody at the neural level. Children's patterns of brain activation when hearing angry, sad, happy, and neutral prosody are examined using fMRI technology. In addition, this project examines whether the processing of affective prosody, particularly angry prosody, is influenced by the child's familiariy with the speaker, by comparing prosody spoken by the child's mother or an unfamiliar female. The findings of this project would inform basic affective neuroscience by including research on young children and would provide a method for subsequent studies of individual differences in typical and at risk children's processing of angry prosody.