Neuroimaging and attachment in Children-at-Risk

处境危险儿童的融合是德国最优先的社会任务之一。此外，处境危险的儿童面临社会解体的风险更大，其结果是教育成功率较低、暴力以及身心和心理障碍，如吸毒增加，特别是在青少年时期。除其他外，这些后果被认为是幼儿期情感忽视或严重创伤经历的结果。在过去的几年里，依恋研究领域的一些研究已经阐明了影响儿童认知情感和社会发展的事实。他们研究了儿童早期依恋模式的发展。本申请旨在拾起这条线索，并调查具有不安全-混乱依恋风格的儿童关于对依恋相关刺激的情绪反应的神经关联。由于混乱的附属小学儿童表现出增加的社会和攻击性问题，本研究采用跨学科研究的方法，通过结构和功能磁共振成像技术，对无组织依恋儿童和安全依恋儿童的结构和功能异常进行了比较研究（sMRI/fMRI）。本研究旨在探讨幼儿期经验、个体依恋模式与神经生物学相关因素之间的关系。

The integration children-at-risk is one of the societal tasks in Germany with top priority. Moreover children-at-risk run an increased risk of social disintegration, with lower educational success, violence, and psychosomatic and psychological disorders such as increased drug use especially in adolescence as a consequence. These consequences are considered to be among others a result of emotional neglect or experiences of severe traumatization in early childhood. In the last few years several studies in the area of empirical attachment research have illuminated facts that affect the cognitive-affective and social development of children. They researched among others the development of attachment patterns in children in early childhood. The current application intends to pick up this thread and investigate children with insecure-disorganized attachment style with regard to neural correlates of emotional reactions to attachment-relevant stimuli. Since disorganized attached elementary school children show augmented social and aggressive problems, the hypothesis is tested if these disorganized attached children experience ostracism more intensively than securely attached children.For this an interdisciplinary study is applied for to test disorganized attached children in comparison to securely attached children with respect to structural and functional abnormalities by means of structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI/fMRI). The study aims at investigating the relationship between early childhood experiences, individual attachment patterns and neurobiological correlates.