The role of attentional shifting in the relation between error monitoring and anxiety in youth.

The error-related negativity (ERN), a well-established neural marker of anxiety, reflects enhanced attention to internal threat signals. While attention to threat plays a crucial role in the development and maintenance of anxiety, it is unclear how attentional control influences the ERN-anxiety association. To address this, 37 youths (M = 10.

Repetitive negative thinking and depressive symptoms are differentially related to response inhibition: The influence of non-emotional, socio-emotional, and self-referential stimuli.

Identifying transdiagnostic correlates of response inhibition deficits is important for understanding risk for internalizing disorders. Little work has compared the relationships between internalizing symptoms and repetitive negative thinking (RNT) with response inhibition across non-emotional and emotional domains, and no work has compared these relationships for inhibition of socio-emotional relative to self-referential stimuli. Undergraduate students (N = 71, 18.

Childhood wayfinding experience explains sex and individual differences in adult wayfinding strategy and anxiety.

Background: Anyone who has ever found themselves lost while driving in an unfamiliar neighborhood or forgotten where they parked their car can appreciate the importance of being able to navigate their environment. Navigation, or wayfinding, is a large-scale spatial ability that involves keeping track of the relative positions of objects and features in space, which allows for determining the path to a goal location. Early experiences shape spatial skill development, and research finds sex differences in spatial behaviors from preschool through adulthood, with males consistently outperforming females.

Case Series of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation as an Augmentation Strategy for Attention Bias Modification Treatment in Adolescents with Anxiety Disorders.

This article presents the results of a case series to assess the feasibility, acceptability, and clinical promise of transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) as an augmentation strategy in clinic referred adolescents. Attention Bias Modification Treatment (ABMT) is a computer-based attention-training protocol designed to reduce rapidly deployed attention orienting to threat and thereby reduce anxiety symptom severity. Studies of ABMT reveal overall small to medium effect sizes.

Using hippocampal-dependent eyeblink conditioning to predict individual differences in spatial reorientation strategies in 3- to 6-year-olds.

The hippocampus is a subcortical structure in the medial temporal lobe involved in cognitive functions such as spatial navigation and reorientation, episodic memory, and associative learning. While much is understood about the role of hippocampal function in learning and memory in adults, less is known about the relations between the hippocampus and the development of these cognitive skills in young children due to the limitations of using standard methods (e.g.

Neural Correlates of Attentional Processing of Threat in Youth with and without Anxiety Disorders.

Late-stage attentional processing of threatening stimuli, quantified through event-related potentials (ERPs), differentiates youth with and without anxiety disorders. It is unknown whether early-stage attentional processing of threatening stimuli differentiates these groups. Examining both early and late stage attentional processes in youth may advance knowledge and enhance efforts to identify biomarkers for translational prevention and treatment research.

Individual differences in non-clinical maternal depression impact infant affect and behavior during the still-face paradigm across the first year.

Maternal depression can significantly impact mothers' sensitivity to their infants' needs as well as infants' social and emotional development. The still-face paradigm (SFP) is widely used to assess infants' understanding of the contingency between their own behavior and that of their caregivers, as well as infants' ability to self-regulate arousal levels during sudden changes in maternal responsiveness. Infants of clinically depressed mothers display blunted levels of negative affect compared to infants of non-depressed mothers during the still-face (SF) phase.

Quantifying Motor Experience in the Infant Brain: EEG Power, Coherence, and Mu Desynchronization.

The emergence of new motor skills, such as reaching and walking, dramatically changes how infants engage with the world socially and cognitively. Several examples of how motor experience can cascade into cognitive and social development have been documented, yet a significant knowledge gap remains in our understanding of whether these observed behavioral changes are accompanied by underlying neural changes. We propose that electroencephalography (EEG) measures such as power, coherence, and mu desynchronization are optimal tools to quantify motor experience in the infant brain.

A new biomarker to examine the role of hippocampal function in the development of spatial reorientation in children: a review.

Spatial navigation is an adaptive skill that involves determining the route to a particular goal or location, and then traveling that path. A major component of spatial navigation is spatial reorientation, or the ability to reestablish a sense of direction after being disoriented. The hippocampus is known to be critical for navigating, and has more recently been implicated in reorienting in adults, but relatively little is known about the development of the hippocampus in relation to these large-scale spatial abilities in children.

Associations between infant temperament, maternal stress, and infants' sleep across the first year of life.

Effects of temperament and maternal stress on infant sleep behaviors were explored longitudinally. Negative temperament was associated with sleep problems, and with longer sleep latency and night wakefulness, whereas maternal stress was associated with day sleep duration, suggesting infant and maternal characteristics affect sleep differentially.

Identification of emotional facial expressions among behaviorally inhibited adolescents with lifetime anxiety disorders.

The current study examined differences in emotion expression identification between adolescents characterised with behavioural inhibition (BI) in childhood with and without a lifetime history of anxiety disorder. Participants were originally assessed for BI during toddlerhood and for social reticence during childhood. During adolescence, participants returned to the laboratory and completed a facial emotion identification task and a clinical psychiatric interview.

On the causes of early life experience effects: evaluating the role of mom.

Early life experiences are thought to have long-lasting effects on cognitive, emotional, and social function during adulthood. Changes in neuroendocrine function, particularly the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, contribute to these systems-level behavioral effects. In searching for causal mechanisms underlying these early experience effects, pioneering research has demonstrated an important role for maternal care in offspring development, and this has led to two persistent ideas that permeate current research and thinking: first, environmental impact on the developing infant is mediated through maternal care behavior; second, the more care that a mother provides, the better off her offspring.

Eyeblink conditioning: a non-invasive biomarker for neurodevelopmental disorders.

Eyeblink conditioning (EBC) is a classical conditioning paradigm typically used to study the underlying neural processes of learning and memory. EBC has a well-defined neural circuitry, is non-invasive, and can be employed in human infants shortly after birth making it an ideal tool to use in both developing and special populations. In addition, abnormalities in the cerebellum, a region of the brain highly involved in EBC, have been implicated in a number of neurodevelopmental disorders including autism spectrum disorders (ASDs).

Effects of negative temperament on 5-month-old infants' behavior during the still-face paradigm.

Five-month-old infants characterized as low or high on temperamental negativity participated with their mothers in the still-face paradigm. Compared to low negative infants, high negative infants displayed greater negative engagement during reunion suggesting that infant temperament significantly contributes to individual differences in the still-face effect.

Individual differences in fear potentiated startle in behaviorally inhibited children.

Behavioral inhibition (BI) is a temperament characterized during early childhood by increased fearfulness to novelty, social reticence to unfamiliar peers, and heightened risk for the development of anxiety. Heightened startle responses to safety cues have been found among behaviorally inhibited adolescents who have an anxiety disorder suggesting that this measure may serve as a biomarker for the development of anxiety amongst this risk population. However, it is unknown if these aberrant startle patterns emerge prior to the manifestation of anxiety in this temperament group.

Reducing behavioral inhibition to novelty via systematic neonatal novelty exposure: the influence of maternal hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal regulation.

Background: Behavioral inhibition (BI) to novelty is thought to be a stable temperament type that appears early in life and is a major risk factor for anxiety disorders. In the rat, habituation of such inhibition can be facilitated via neonatal novelty exposure (NNE), thus reducing BI to novelty. Here, we tested the hypothesis that this early intervention effect is modulated by the context of maternal self-stress regulation.

Maternal modulation of novelty effects on physical development.

Familiarity to the mother and the novelty afforded by the postnatal environment are two contrasting sources of neonatal influence. One hypothesis regarding their relationship is the maternal modulation hypothesis, which predicts that the same neonatal stimulation may have different effects depending on the maternal context. Here we tested this hypothesis using physical development, indexed by body weight, as an endpoint and found that, among offspring of mothers with a high initial swim-stress-induced corticosterone (CORT) response, neonatal novelty exposure induced an enhancement in early growth, and among offspring with mothers of a low initial CORT response, the same neonatal stimulation induced an impairment.

The predictive nature of individual differences in early associative learning and emerging social behavior.

Across the first year of life, infants achieve remarkable success in their ability to interact in the social world. The hierarchical nature of circuit and skill development predicts that the emergence of social behaviors may depend upon an infant's early abilities to detect contingencies, particularly socially-relevant associations. Here, we examined whether individual differences in the rate of associative learning at one month of age is an enduring predictor of social, imitative, and discriminative behaviors measured across the human infant's first year.

Functional specificity in the modulation of novelty exposure effects by reliability of maternal care.

Using the within-litter neonatal novelty exposure procedure, we manipulated newborn pups' environmental novelty independently from natural variations in maternal care. To better translate animal models to human development studies, we introduce a measure for maternal care reliability. We examined how this reliability modulates novelty-exposure-induced effects on offspring cognitive, social, and emotional development and show that maternal care reliability acts in a function-specific manner.

One-month-old human infants learn about the social world while they sleep.

Although infants display preferences for social stimuli early in their lives, we know relatively little about the mechanisms of infant learning about the social world. In the current set of studies, 1-month-old infants underwent an adapted eyeblink conditioning paradigm to examine learning to both 'social' and non-social cues. While infants were asleep, they were presented with either a 'social' stimulus (a female voice) or one of two non-social stimuli (tone or backward voice) followed by an airpuff presented to the eyelid.

Dissociation between neonatal novelty-induced preferential maternal care and enhancement in cognitive, social, and emotional functions.

Early life stimulation is known to produce long-lasting changes in the brain and behavior. One such early stimulation method is the neonatal novelty exposure procedure which allows the isolation of the novelty effect from several prominent confounding factors inherent to the neonatal handling procedure. In two previous studies, we found long-lasting novelty effects on different sets of functional measures without accompanying preferential maternal care, even when the observation was made immediately after the novelty manipulation, a time when such preferential care is most likely to be expressed.

Neonatal novelty-induced persistent enhancement in offspring spatial memory and the modulatory role of maternal self-stress regulation.

Development of spatial memory in the rat is influenced by both maternal and nonmaternal aspects of the postnatal environment. Yet it remains poorly understood how these two aspects of the postnatal environment interact to program offspring cognitive development. By considering the joint influence of neonatal environmental novelty and maternal self-stress regulation on the development of spatial memory function in Long-Evans hooded rats, we show a persistent neonatal novelty-induced enhancement in spatial reference and working memory functions among the same individual offspring from juvenility to adulthood and a contrasting transient maternal modulatory influence on this novelty-related enhancement present during only juvenility.

Attention biases to threat link behavioral inhibition to social withdrawal over time in very young children.

Behaviorally inhibited children display a temperamental profile characterized by social withdrawal and anxious behaviors. Previous research, focused largely on adolescents, suggests that attention biases to threat may sustain high levels of behavioral inhibition (BI) over time, helping link early temperament to social outcomes. However, no prior studies examine the association between attention bias and BI before adolescence.

Longitudinal stability of temperamental exuberance and social-emotional outcomes in early childhood.

The goals of the current study were to investigate the stability of temperamental exuberance across infancy and toddlerhood and to examine the associations between exuberance and social-emotional outcomes in early childhood. The sample consisted of 291 4-month-olds followed at 9, 24, and 36 months and again at 5 years of age. Behavioral measures of exuberance were collected at 9, 24, and 36 months.

Ordinary variations in human maternal caregiving in infancy and biobehavioral development in early childhood: A follow-up study.

Rodent models of early caregiving find that pups reared by dams providing low levels of early stimulation subsequently display heightened stress reactivity and social aggression. We examined these effects in humans by investigating the effects of early caregiving on markers of biobehavioral development at ages 2 and 3 years. This study extended the findings reported by Hane and Fox (Hane and Fox [2006] Psychol.