Emotion processing in development: An ERP Investigation

描述(申请人提供)：日常生活中的许多经历都会引起情绪反应，从低度唤起到高度激起。在理解成年人如何处理情绪事件方面已经取得了实质性的进展。这项研究清楚地表明，个人表达和表达情感经历的方式对心理健康有影响。由于情绪理解对日常生活质量和心理健康的重要性，我们了解整个生命周期中的情绪过程是至关重要的。对成年人的研究揭示了对情绪刺激的反应特征模式，以及情绪体验处理过程中的个体和性别差异。随着幼儿开始了解情绪体验的原因和后果，在发育早期也有大量关于情绪表达和调节的研究。相比之下，关于小学和青春期情绪处理的研究很少。因此，我们对导致成熟情绪处理的发育变化的时间或过程知之甚少。这项拟议的研究将通过使用事件相关电位(ERPs)的神经成像工具来检测学龄儿童在青春期中期的情绪处理，从而开始填补这些空白。由于其精细的时间分辨率(毫秒级)，事件相关电位非常适合于情绪处理的检查，允许在经历情绪反应时实时观察情绪反应。这项工作将被用来解决两个具体的目标：(1a)检查学龄儿童到青少年在情绪处理方面的发展变化，样本足够大，以允许检查可能与内化和外化障碍有关的情绪处理的性别差异模式的出现(分别在女性和男性中)；(1b)检查对情绪刺激的神经反应模式的出现，这种模式在成人中很典型，但到目前为止在儿童中还没有观察到；以及(2)考察儿童第一次处理情绪刺激时的情绪加工，以及他们通过记忆重新体验事件时的情绪加工，从而为情绪加工的发展变化提供一个更完整的视角。这项拟议的研究将阐明儿童到青春期中期情绪加工的典型发展过程，届时情绪加工的成熟模式有望变得明显。这项研究将为后来旨在理解情绪加工出错的翻译工作奠定基础，例如在儿童和青少年的内在化和外部化障碍中观察到的情况。考察情绪瞬间加工和基于记忆的加工范式的结合将特别强大，具有很高的生态效度。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Many of the experiences of everyday life induce emotional reactions, ranging from low to highly arousing. There has been substantial progress in understanding how adults process emotional events. The work has made clear that the ways in which individuals represent and express their emotional experiences has implications for mental health. Because of the importance of emotional construal to the quality of everyday life and to mental health, it is crucial that we understand emotion processing across the lifespan. Research with adults has revealed characteristic patterns of response to emotional stimuli as well as both individual and gender differences in processing of emotional experience. There also has been substantial research on expression and regulation of emotion early in development, as young children are beginning to learn about the causes and consequences of emotional experiences. In contrast, there has been little research on emotion processing in the elementary school years and into adolescence. As a result, we know little about the timing or course of developmental changes leading up to mature emotion processing. The proposed research will begin to fill these gaps by using the neuroimaging tool of event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine emotion processing in school-age children through middle adolescence. ERPs are ideally suited to examination of emotion processing due to their exquisite temporal resolution (on the scale of milliseconds), permitting observation of emotional responses in real time, as they are experienced. The work will be used to address two specific aims: (1a) examination of developmental changes in emotion processing in school- age children to young adolescents, with samples sufficiently large to permit examination of the emergence of gender-differential patterns of emotion processing that may be associated with internalizing and externalizing disorders (in females and males, respectively); (1b) examination of the emergence of patterns of neural response to emotional stimuli that are typical in adults, yet which to date have not been observed in children; and (2) examining emotion processing both as children process emotional stimuli for the first time and as they re-experience the events through memory, thereby providing a more complete perspective on developmental changes in emotion processing. The proposed research will elucidate the typical course of development of emotion processing in childhood through middle adolescence, when mature patterns of emotion processing are expected to become apparent. The research will be foundational for later translational work aimed at understanding emotion processing gone awry, such as observed in internalizing and externalizing disorders of childhood and adolescence. The combination of paradigms for examining processing of emotion in the moment and based on memory will be especially powerful, with high ecological validity.