Development of affect processing and regulation: an electrocortical approach

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The appraisal, regulation, and expression of emotion play important roles in the motivational and communicative aspects of human behaviour and are critical to optimal human development. All of the Axis II disorders described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-IV, American Psychiatric Association, 1994, e.g., depression, anxiety, conduct disorder) list an inability to regulate negative affect as a criterion for diagnosis. We know, however, comparatively little in terms of the development of affect processing and regulation in children. A first step in understanding how children regulate emotion is to understand how they process emotion. The primary goal of my NSERC-funded research program is to examine the development of affect processing and regulation in typically developing children during the first four years of life. In a series of recent NSERC-funded studies, we found distinct patterns of frontal lobe and autonomic activity during the processing of different types of affective auditory and visual stimuli in human infants and adults. The proposed NSERC grant period will allow us to continue and extend our work examining the development of affect processing and regulation in typical human development to older children and young adults. We will: 1) in our initial studies, recruit separate cohorts of young adults in order to refine our measures and to extend our previous developmental work to adults, 2) recruit cross-sectional cohorts at developmental time points in early childhood, and recruit a separate cohort of 24-month-old children to follow longitudinally and test at the same time-points as the cross-sectional cohorts, in order to refine the developmental picture; 3) map regional brain development using a more dense array (128 EEG electrodes) to measure EEG frequency and coherence and relate these measures to affect processing and regulation at different ages and across time, 4) for the first time, examine temporally refined measures of brain activity [e.g., event-related brain responses (ERPs)] in response to other sensory stimuli (e.g.,facial displays of emotions) across development, and 5) measure the source of child EEG signals by using the dense EEG array.