Humanity's evolved nest and its relation to cardiac vagal regulation in the first years of life.

Background: The Evolved Developmental Niche (EDN) is a millions-year-old developmental system that matches the maturational schedule of the offspring, optimizing health. Every animal has a developmental niche.

Aims: Humanity has fallen away from providing its EDN.

The evolved nest, oxytocin functioning, and prosocial development.

Prosociality, orientation to attuned, empathic relationships, is built from the ground up, through supportive care in early life that fosters healthy neurobiological structures that shape behavior. Numerous social and environmental factors within early life have been identified as critical variables influencing child physiological and psychological outcomes indicating a growing need to synthesize which factors are the most influential. To address this gap, we examined the influence of early life experiences according to the evolved developmental niche or and its influence on child neurobiological and sociomoral outcomes, specifically, the oxytocinergic system and prosociality, respectively.

Sociomoral Temperament: A Mediator Between Wellbeing and Social Outcomes in Young Children.

Social outcomes, such as empathy, conscience, and behavioral self-regulation, might require a baseline of psychological wellbeing. According to Triune Ethics Metatheory (TEM), early experience influences the neuropsychology underlying a child's orientation toward the social and moral world. Theoretically, a child's wellbeing, fostered through early caregiving, promotes sociomoral temperaments that correspond to the child's experience, such as social approach or withdrawal in face-to-face situations.

Effects of adverse childhood experience on physiological regulation are moderated by evolved developmental niche history.

Childhood experiences of early life stress and adversity can lead to long-term detrimental outcomes across the lifespan. Recent evidence suggests avoiding stressors is not enough for species-typical development. Nurturing and responsive care are needed to both buffer adverse experiences as well as promote healthy development, but little is known regarding the interaction between species-typical environmental support in childhood, Evolved Developmental Niche history (EDN-history), and adversity on physiological regulation in adult women.

Opportunities for free play and young children's autonomic regulation.

Aspects of the social environment have been linked to the physiological mechanisms underlying behavioral self-regulation. Play, a behavior connected to regulatory behaviors such as delay of gratification and regulation of emotions, might be an aspect of social environments that is supportive of healthy physiological adaptation. We examined whether opportunities for social free play with peers, as reported by mothers, would predict children's autonomic regulation (via respiratory sinus arrhythmia; RSA) in a sample of 78 five-year-old children.

Body-Centered Interventions for Psychopathological Conditions: A Review.

World-wide, billions of dollars are spent each year on body-centered interventions to alleviate both physical and psychological pathologies. Given the high demand and increasing popularity of body-centered interventions, there is need for a systematic organization of empirical evidence associated with body-centered therapies. This article reviews the psychological effects of body-centered interventions on emotional well-being, including both self and other-administered (receptive) therapies.