Parent-child proximity and emerging psychopathology

项目总结/摘要 儿童所经历的生存环境是塑造大脑的最重要的可变特征 发展和影响随后的心理健康。从婴儿心理健康知识和 发展神经科学，这个NIMH大脑奖申请旨在促进我们的理解 儿童在婴儿期与其照顾者的经历，这一发展时期的特点是， 大脑可塑性增强，影响大脑和行为发育。具体而言，我们将利用创新 描述与大脑变化相关的早期发育环境多方面特征的方法 结构和功能的连接，被认为有助于精神障碍的发作。的 新工具的应用，再加上传统的衡量标准，将改善我们对儿童健康的衡量。 使用以儿童为中心的方法的经验（即，捕捉儿童与多个照顾者的接触）。做 为此，我们将招募150名怀孕妇女，并在分娩后，在儿童日报上进行评估。 1、6、12和18个月龄时的生态环境。该项目引入了一种可穿戴设备技术， 可以动态地、不显眼地、连续地测量儿童之间的物理接近模式， 照顾者，无论物理位置。除了孩子们接近照顾者，我们将获得 语言暴露和基于观察的照顾者敏感性的生态评估，并检查 这些捕捉儿童经验的不同方式之间的趋同和分歧（具体目标1）。 虽然先前的研究表明，环境丰富程度越高， 精神病理学，测量中缺乏粒度（即，没有捕捉到相对的完整连续体 社会心理忽视-丰富）已经排除了描述这些关联的形状的能力 (e.g.,线性、非线性）。我们将研究儿童选择范围的经验沿着忽视-丰富 连续和使用婴儿大脑结构和功能连接的重复神经成像和重复 行为评估，以探索可能的轮廓之间的关联方面的研究， 环境和大脑和行为的变化（具体目标2）。最后，我们将研究如何改变， 情绪调节和情绪推理回路与出现的精神病理学迹象有关， 年龄18个月，以测试早期经验的变化是否，何时以及如何影响风险， 通过情绪相关回路的变化来改变精神病理学（具体目标3）。在这里，神经成像是 特别有利的是，它允许我们从出生开始检查情感相关网络的成熟， 重要的是，在出现可检测的心理健康问题之前。实现本提案的目标 预计将满足NIMH的目标，以确定生物和心理机制， 经验影响神经和行为发育，直接应用于预防和早期治疗。 干预

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The caregiving environment children experience is the most important modifiable feature for shaping brain development and influencing subsequent mental health. Building from knowledge of infant mental health and developmental neuroscience, this NIMH BRAINS award application is designed to advance our understanding of how children’s experiences with their caregivers during infancy, a developmental period characterized by heightened brain plasticity, influences brain and behavioral development. Specifically, we will use innovative methods to characterize multiple aspects of the early caregiving environment in relation to changes in brain structural and functional connectivity that are believed to contribute to the onset of mental disorders. The application of new tools, coupled with traditional metrics, will improve our measurement of children’s experiences using a child-centered approach (i.e., capturing children’s contact with multiple caregivers). To do this, we will recruit 150 women in pregnancy and, following birth, conduct assessments in children’s daily ecological context at ages 1, 6, 12, and 18 months. This project introduces a wearable device technology that can dynamically, unobtrusively, and continuously measure patterns of physical proximity between children and caregivers, regardless of physical location. In addition to children’s proximity to caregivers, we will obtain ecological assessments of language exposure and observation-based caregiver sensitivity and examine the convergence and divergence among these different ways of capturing children’s experiences (Specific Aim 1). While prior research suggests that greater environmental enrichment leads to lower symptoms of psychopathology, the lack of granularity in measurement (i.e., not capturing the full continuum of relative psychosocial neglect–enrichment) has precluded the ability to characterize the shape of these associations (e.g., linear, nonlinear). We will study children selected to range in experiences along the neglect–enrichment continuum and use repeated neuroimaging of infant brain structural and functional connectivity and repeated behavioral assessments to explore the possible profile of the associations between aspects of the caregiving environment and changes in brain and behavior (Specific Aim 2). Last, we will examine how changes in emotion regulation and emotion reasoning circuitry are associated with signs of emerging psychopathology at age 18 months in order to test whether, when, and how variations in early experience influence risk for psychopathology through changes in emotion-related circuitry (Specific Aim 3). Here, neuroimaging is particularly advantageous as it allows us to examine the maturation of emotion-related networks from birth and, importantly, prior to the onset of detectable mental health difficulties. Achievement of the aims of this proposal is expected to meet NIMH’s objectives to determine the biological and psychological mechanisms by which experience affects neural and behavioral development, with direct applications for prevention and early intervention.