The development of emotion processing and regulation in children: An electrocortical approach

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How children regulate their emotions plays a critical role in school age children’s functioning across a range of domains, including academic attainment, and peer and social relationships. A first step in understanding how children regulate their emotions is to understand how they process them. The early school age developmental period is a particularly salient time for the study of emotion, in that it coincides with the emergence of school entry, the development of social-cognition, and peer relationships, in which emotions have a fundamental role. However, there is a dearth of empirical evidence on how young children process emotion, and still relatively less on how these processes are instantiated in the brain at this age. The primary objective of my continuously funded NSERC program of research has been to understand emotion processing and regulation in typical development. In a series of NSERC funded studies with infants and adults, we have found distinct patterns of frontal lobe, limbic, autonomic, and endocrine activity during the processing of fear, anger, and happiness in infants and adults, using behavioural, fMRI, electrocortical, autonomic, and endocrine measures (see Miskovic & Schmidt, 2012a,b; Schmidt & Miskovic, 2014, for reviews). We have found that the experience of positive emotions (e.g., happiness) is associated with greater relative left frontal brain activity, whereas the experience of negative affect (e.g., fear) is associated with greater relative right frontal brain activity. The proposed NSERC grant will extend my prior NSERC work with infants and young adults to examine the development of emotion processing in typically-developing school age children. Here, we will recruit cross-sectional cohorts of typically developing children at ages 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 years. The cohort of 4-year-olds will be followed longitudinally at the same time points. We will employ a longitudinally accelerated design, allowing us to examine age-related changes in emotional processing at school entry (age 4) and then during the early school years. We will address the following questions: (1) Are there distinct patterns of electrocortical activity, heart rate, and cortisol responses during the processing of positive and negative emotions in early school age children linked to behaviour, and do these patterns change with age? (2) Are individual differences in electrocortical activity related to positive and negative emotion induction and behaviour? (3) Where are the sources of electrocortical signals (EEG and ERP) in the brain? Emotion regulatory problems in childhood are economically costly to all Canadians in terms of mental health costs, work loss, and delinquency - let alone the toll they take on families and children who are affected. The proposed work has implications to understanding basic brain and behavioural processes/mechanisms underlying emotion regulatory problems.