Early Infant Prefrontal Cortical Microstructure Predicts Present and Future Emotionality.

Background: High levels of infant negative emotionality (NE) and low positive emotionality (PE) predict future emotional and behavioral problems. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) supports emotional regulation, with each PFC subregion specializing in specific emotional processes. Neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging estimates microstructural integrity and myelination via the neurite density index (NDI) and dispersion via the orientation dispersion index (ODI), with potential to more accurately evaluate microstructural alterations in the developing brain.

Prenatal stress and externalizing behaviors in childhood and adolescence: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Accumulating evidence suggests that psychological distress during pregnancy is linked to offspring risk for externalizing outcomes (e.g., reactive/aggressive behaviors, hyperactivity, and impulsivity).

Early infant prefrontal gray matter volume is associated with concurrent and future infant emotionality.

High levels of infant negative emotionality (NE) are associated with emotional and behavioral problems later in childhood. Identifying neural markers of high NE as well as low positive emotionality (PE) in infancy can provide neural markers to aid early identification of vulnerability, and inform interventions to help delay or even prevent psychiatric disorders before the manifestation of symptoms. Prefrontal cortical (PFC) subregions support the regulation of NE and PE, with each PFC subregion differentially specializing in distinct emotional regulation processes.

Neural Network Functional Interactions Mediate or Suppress White Matter-Emotional Behavior Relationships in Infants.

Background: Elucidating the neural basis of infant positive emotionality and negative emotionality can identify biomarkers of pathophysiological risk. Our goal was to determine how functional interactions among large-scale networks supporting emotional regulation influence white matter (WM) microstructural-emotional behavior relationships in 3-month-old infants. We hypothesized that microstructural-emotional behavior relationships would be differentially mediated or suppressed by underlying resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC), particularly between default mode network and central executive network structures.

Patterns of Infant Amygdala Connectivity Mediate the Impact of High Caregiver Affect on Reducing Infant Smiling: Discovery and Replication.

Background: Behavioral research indicates that caregiver mood disorders and emotional instability in the early months following childbirth are associated with lower positive emotionality and higher negative emotionality in infants, but the neural mechanisms remain understudied.

Methods: Using resting-state functional connectivity as a measure of the functional architecture of the early infant brain, we aimed to determine the extent to which connectivity between the amygdala, a key region supporting emotional learning and perception, and large-scale neural networks mediated the association between caregiver affect and anxiety and early infant negative emotionality and positive emotionality. Two samples of infants (first sample: n = 58; second sample: n = 31) 3 months of age underwent magnetic resonance imaging during natural sleep.

Limbic white matter structural integrity at 3 months prospectively predicts negative emotionality in 9-month-old infants: a preliminary study.

Background: Little is known about how early alterations in white matter relate to clinically relevant behaviors such as emotional dysregulation. Thus, our goal was to examine how the white matter structural integrity of key limbic (i.e.