Children's Facial Muscular Movements and Risk for Early Psychopathology: Assessing Clinical Utility.

Standardized developmentally based assessment systems have transformed the capacity to identify transdiagnostic behavioral markers of mental disorder risk in early childhood, notably, clinically significant irritability and externalizing behaviors. However, behavior-based instruments that both differentiate risk for persistent psychopathology from normative misbehavior, and are feasible for community clinicians to implement, are in nascent phases of development. Young children's facial expressions during frustration challenges may form the basis for novel assessments tools that are flexible, quick, and easy to implement as markers of psychopathology to complement validated questionnaires.

Irritability uniquely predicts prefrontal cortex activation during preschool inhibitory control among all temperament domains: A LASSO approach.

Temperament, defined as individual variation in the reactivity and regulation of emotional, motor, and attentional processes, has been shown to influence emotional and cognitive development during the preschool period (ages 4-5). While relationships between temperament and neural activity have been investigated previously, these have typically investigated individual temperament dimensions selected ad hoc. Since significant correlations exist between various temperament dimensions, it remains unclear whether these findings would replicate while analyzing all temperament dimensions simultaneously.

Putting our heads together: interpersonal neural synchronization as a biological mechanism for shared intentionality.

Shared intentionality, or collaborative interactions in which individuals have a shared goal and must coordinate their efforts, is a core component of human interaction. However, the biological bases of shared intentionality and, specifically, the processes by which the brain adjusts to the sharing of common goals, remain largely unknown. Using functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), coordination of cerebral hemodynamic activation was found in subject pairs when completing a puzzle together in contrast to a condition in which subjects completed identical but individual puzzles (same intention without shared intentionality).

Using facial muscular movements to understand young children's emotion regulation and concurrent neural activation.

Individual differences in young children's frustration responses set the stage for myriad developmental outcomes and represent an area of intense empirical interest. Emotion regulation is hypothesized to comprise the interplay of complex behaviors, such as facial expressions, and activation of concurrent underlying neural systems. At present, however, the literature has mostly examined children's observed emotion regulation behaviors and assumed underlying brain activation through separate investigations, resulting in theoretical gaps in our understanding of how children regulate emotion in vivo.