Social re-orientation and brain development: An expanded and updated view.

Social development has been the focus of a great deal of neuroscience based research over the past decade. In this review, we focus on providing a framework for understanding how changes in facets of social development may correspond with changes in brain function. We argue that (1) distinct phases of social behavior emerge based on whether the organizing social force is the mother, peer play, peer integration, or romantic intimacy; (2) each phase is marked by a high degree of affect-driven motivation that elicits a distinct response in subcortical structures; (3) activity generated by these structures interacts with circuits in prefrontal cortex that guide executive functions, and occipital and temporal lobe circuits, which generate specific sensory and perceptual social representations. We propose that the direction, magnitude and duration of interaction among these affective, executive, and perceptual systems may relate to distinct sensitive periods across development that contribute to establishing long-term patterns of brain function and behavior

Adolescent Development in Context: Social, Psychological, and Neurological Foundations

This project was funded by KU Libraries’ Parent’s Campaign with support from the David Shulenburger Office of Scholarly Communication & Copyright and the Open Educational Resources Working Group in the University of Kansas Libraries.Increasingly, there is a tendency to characterize the teenage years as a time of general moral degeneration and deviance. This is unfortunate because the teenage years represent a key developmental period of the typical human lifespan, and from an evolutionary point of view, the actual characteristics that define adolescence represent critical learning opportunities. The increased sensitivity to social influences, identity formation, and social-emotional skills are just a few of such opportunities that require appropriate environments and contexts for optimal, healthy outcomes. Research in the field of adolescent development has not been immune to the negative stereotypes surrounding adolescence, and it is common to see researchers, either implicitly or explicitly, refer to adolescence as a high-risk, anomalous developmental stage that must be controlled, managed, or simply endured until adult-level abilities emerge spontaneously as a result of having survived an intrinsically tumultuous developmental time. More enlightened views of adolescence recognize that all biological adaptations have a cause and a purpose, and that the purpose of adolescence can be discerned from understanding the complex evolutionary history of humans as a group-based, family-based, highly social, sometimes competitive, abstract-thinking species. Understanding the biological foundations of adolescence is meaningless if one does not also consider how biology and environment interact. In humans, these interactions are highly complex and involve not only immediate physical realities, but also social, cultural, and historical realities that create complex contexts and webs of interactions. Therefore, this textbook seeks to reconcile the biological and neurological foundations of human development with the psychological and sociological mechanisms that formed and continue to influence human developmental trajectories. To this end, we have divided the textbook into three main sections. The first, Foundations of Adolescent Development, introduces the historical science of studying adolescence and the biological foundations of puberty. The second section, Contexts of Adolescent Development, considers the primary contextual factors that influence developmental outcomes during adolescence. These include work and employment, peers, in-school and out-of-school contexts, leisure time, and the family. The final section, Milestones of Adolescent Development, addresses the primary psychological milestones that represent healthy adjustment to adult roles and responsibilities in society. The domains of these milestones include cognition and decision-making; identity, meaning, and purpose, moral development, and sexuality. From an educational point of view, the objective of this textbook is to provide a resource that is capable of fostering advanced conceptual change and learning in the field of adolescent development in order to go beyond stereotypical portrayals of adolescence as a pathological condition. Organized in a manner designed to scaffold increasingly complex ideas, the textbook redefines adolescence a sensitive period of development characterized by phylogenetically derived experience-expectant states and complex interactions of biological, psychological, and social factors. The textbook draws from the latest advances in neuroscience and psychology to construct a practical framework for use in a wide range of academic and professional contexts, and it presents historical as well as contemporary research to accomplish a radical redefining of an often misunderstood and maligned developmental period

Childhood Trauma And Emotion Processing Neurocircuitry

Childhood trauma is one of the strongest risk factors for a range of common and debilitating neuropsychiatric disorders, including anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These emotion-related disorders have their roots in childhood and adolescence, underscoring a critical need to understand their biological bases in early life. In this dissertation, we evaluate how childhood trauma impacts emotion processing neurocircuitry in a sample of high-risk urban youth, ages 7-15. In four inter-related studies, we test neural function and functional connectivity of core emotion processing regions, including the amygdala, insula, and pregenual/subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (pgACC/sgACC). To examine the relevance of observed neurological changes, we evaluate behavioral performance on emotion processing neuropsychological tasks, as well as specific dimensions of subjective affective experience. Results indicate that, relative to matched comparison youth, trauma-exposed youth have (1) increased neural response to salient emotional cues in amygdala and insula, (2) reduced functional connectivity between amygdala and pgACC/sgACC, a pathway critical for emotion regulation, and (3) altered within- and between-network connectivity of the salience network, involved in detecting and orienting attention to salient emotional stimuli. These neurological changes are accompanied by behavioral alterations: trauma-exposed youth have a lower ability to ignore distracting emotional information, and to automatically regulate emotion. Additionally, observed neurobehavioral changes relate to a specific dimension of affective experience – reward sensitivity (RS), rather than negative affect. Moreover, trauma-exposed youth with the greatest neurobehavioral impairment report lower RS, suggesting reduced positive environmental engagement. These results suggest that RS may be a marker of stress susceptibility, a notion supported by emerging basic and clinical research. Based on our neurobehavioral findings, we discuss potential implications for intervention, and relay an emerging framework that dissociates neurological effects of different trauma types (i.e., threat/victimization vs. deprivation/neglect). In closing, we discuss future directions, including longitudinal research and evaluating the modulation of learned fear – a neurobehavioral mechanism that depends on emotion processing neurocircuitry, but has yet to be tested in trauma-exposed youth

Does the Relationship between Age and Brain Structure Differ in Youth with Conduct Disorder?

Conduct disorder (CD) is characterised by persistent antisocial and aggressive behaviour and typically emerges in childhood or adolescence. Although several authors have proposed that CD is a neurodevelopmental disorder, very little evidence is available about brain development in this condition. Structural brain alterations have been observed in CD, and some indirect evidence for delayed brain maturation has been reported. However, no detailed analysis of age-related changes in brain structure in youth with CD has been conducted. Using cross-sectional MRI data, this study aimed to explore differences in brain maturation in youth with CD versus healthy controls to provide further understanding of the neurodevelopmental processes underlying CD. 291 CD cases (153 males) and 379 healthy controls (160 males) aged 9–18 years (Mage = 14.4) were selected from the European multisite FemNAT-CD study. Structural MRI scans were analysed using surface-based morphometry followed by application of the ENIGMA quality control protocols. An atlas-based approach was used to investigate group differences and test for group-by-age and group-by-age-by-sex interactions in cortical thickness, surface area and subcortical volumes. Relative to healthy controls, the CD group showed lower surface area across frontal, temporal and parietal regions as well as lower total surface area. No significant group-by-age or group-by-age-by-sex interactions were observed on any brain structure measure. These findings suggest that CD is associated with lower surface area across multiple cortical regions, but do not support the idea that CD is associated with delayed brain maturation, at least within the age bracket considered here.</p

Translational neuroscience measures of fear conditioning across development: applications to high-risk children and adolescents

Several mental illnesses, including anxiety, can manifest during development, with onsets in late childhood. Understanding the neurobiological underpinnings of risk for anxiety is of crucial importance for early prevention and intervention approaches. Translational neuroscience offers tools to investigate such mechanisms in human and animal models. The current review describes paradigms derived from neuroscience, such as fear conditioning and extinction and overviews studies that have used these paradigms in animals and humans across development. The review also briefly discusses developmental trajectories of the relevant neural circuits and the emergence of clinical anxiety. Future studies should focus on developmental changes in these paradigms, paying close attention to neurobiological and hormonal changes associated with childhood and adolescence

Brain activation during face perception: evidence of a developmental change.

Behavioral studies suggest that children under age 10 process faces using a piecemeal strategy based on individual distinctive facial features, whereas older children use a configural strategy based on the spatial relations among the face's features. The purpose of this study was to determine whether activation of the fusiform gyrus, which is involved in face processing in adults, is greater during face processing in older children (12-14 years) than in younger children (8-10 years). Functional MRI scans were obtained while children viewed faces and houses. A developmental change was observed: Older children, but not younger children, showed significantly more activation in bilateral fusiform gyri for faces than for houses. Activation in the fusiform gyrus correlated significantly with age and with a behavioral measure of configural face processing. Regions believed to be involved in processing basic facial features were activated in both younger and older children. Some evidence was also observed for greater activation for houses versus faces for the older children than for the younger children, suggesting that processing of these two stimulus types becomes more differentiated as children age. The current results provide biological insight into changes in visual processing of faces that occur with normal development

The rehabilitation of face recognition impairments: A critical review and future directions

While much research has investigated the neural and cognitive characteristics of face recognition impairments (prosopagnosia), much less work has examined their rehabilitation. In this paper, we present a critical analysis of the studies that have attempted to improve face-processing skills in acquired and developmental prosopagnosia, and place them in the context of the wider neurorehabilitation literature. First, we examine whether neuroplasticity within the typical face-processing system varies across the lifespan, in order to examine whether timing of intervention may be crucial. Second, we examine reports of interventions in acquired prosopagnosia, where training in compensatory strategies has had some success. Third, we examine reports of interventions in developmental prosopagnosia, where compensatory training in children and remedial training in adults have both been successful. However, the gains are somewhat limited-compensatory strategies have resulted in labored recognition techniques and limited generalization to untrained faces, and remedial techniques require longer periods of training and result in limited maintenance of gains. Critically, intervention suitability and outcome in both forms of the condition likely depends on a complex interaction of factors, including prosopagnosia severity, the precise functional locus of the impairment, and individual differences such as age. Finally, we discuss future directions in the rehabilitation of prosopagnosia, and the possibility of boosting the effects of cognitive training programmes by simultaneous administration of oxytocin or non-invasive brain stimulation. We conclude that future work using more systematic methods and larger participant groups is clearly required, and in the case of developmental prosopagnosia, there is an urgent need to develop early detection and remediation tools for children, in order to optimize intervention outcome. © 2014 Bate and Bennetts

Pulling at Your Heartstrings: Examining Four Leadership Approaches From the Neuroscience Perspective

Purpose: This review study aims to bridge neuroscience and educational leadership by exploring the neural mechanisms of the constructs relevant to educational leadership. Research methods: The reviewed literature includes 69 neuroscience studies and four books on neuroscience. The brain activities and neurotransmitters associated with the constructs pertinent to educational leadership were coded to bridge the knowledge base of neuroscience and educational leadership. Findings: The neural mechanisms of the constructs related to educational leadership (e.g., vision, charisma, trust, and organizational justice) were organized by four different leadership approaches: charismatic, transformational, destructive, and culturally responsive school leadership. Emotions are the common thread weaving through all four leadership approaches. Implications: This study has salient theoretical, methodological, and practical implications for educational leadership. Theoretically, the findings not only accentuate the role of emotions in educational leadership, but also reveal the trade-off between emotions and analytical calculation in leaders’ decision making. Methodologically, the neuroscience methods (e.g., fMRI, qEEG, and hormonal analysis) add to the methodological repertoire of educational leadership research. Practically, the findings warrant the emotion training and present the potential of using neurological measurements in school leadership preparation and professional development

Coupling of the HPA and HPG Axes

The Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) and –Gonadal (HPG) axes have been considered mutually inhibitory; however, emerging evidence supports the proposition that this might not necessarily be the case. This idea is termed “coupling,” in which the HPA-HPG axis are mutually activated or deactivated. Coupling is examined across three data sets with different time-courses of stress exposure, and results demonstrate HPA-HPG co-activation occurs. Furthermore, stress exposure influences this relationship. The discussion shows how it is physiologically possible to have positive coupling or co-activation between these axes according to complex regulatory feedback systems and overlapping neural structures. Findings are interpreted developmentally, because adolescence may be a critical time for this co-activation to occur. Finally, the discussion emphasizes an individual difference perspective because each individual differs in the duration and type of stress they experience, and these exerted individualized effects on HPA-HPG coupling

Contextual Influences on Youth Socioemotional and Corticolimbic Development

The formation of adaptive socioemotional skills is a key developmental competency in childhood and such behaviors are supported, in part, by neural function within the corticolimbic system. Multiple features of the social context (e.g., harsh parenting) and individual-level markers of maturation (e.g., pubertal development) are robust predictors of youth socioemotional outcomes, but several gaps in the literature remain. However, more research is needed to investigate the timing and specificity of contextual and maturation effects on youth socioemotional and corticolimbic development, using population-based studies that allow for generalization of the results to a broader population. This three study dissertation integrates research on socioeconomic disadvantage, neural correlates of emotion processing, and internalizing and externalizing behaviors in childhood in service of these goals. Study 1 tests a longitudinal Family Stress Model using prospectively-collected data from a population-based nationwide study of children followed from birth through age 9, with an oversample of disadvantaged families. Study 2 builds on the results of Study 1 by examining the influence of initial levels and changes in harsh parenting across childhood on corticolimbic function during adolescence. Finally, Study 3 evaluates the effects of age and puberty on amygdala-prefrontal connectivity during face processing, using a large cross-sectional population-based sample of twins from Southeast Michigan. The general discussion chapter of this dissertation highlights theoretical and empirical considerations for this research, as well as outlines several future directions.PHDPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/153437/1/arigard_1.pd