53,451 research outputs found
How to encourage empathy from birth: neurological roots and the importance of responsive practice
Studies in social neuroscience and brain imaging that
have investigated the neural basis of human empathy
reveal that the development of empathy is rooted in
early infancy, well before the emergence of verbal
abilities and more complex capacities in in social
understanding (Tousignant, Eugène & Jackson, 2017).
The key focus of this article is to demonstrate how
experiences and interactions in the earliest months of
life impact on neural circuits, overall brain development
and, in particular, the development of empathy and
altruist motivation in children from birth. Guidance
on supporting empathy in early childhood education
and care practice through responsive reciprocal
relationships is also offered
A prospective longitudinal study of perceived infant outcomes at 18-24 months: Neural and psychological correlates of parental thoughts and actions assessed during the first month postpartum
The first postpartum months constitute a critical period for parents to establish an emotional bond with their infants. Neural responses to infant-related stimuli have been associated with parental sensitivity. However, the associations among these neural responses, parenting, and later infant outcomes for mothers and fathers are unknown. In the current longitudinal study, we investigated the relationships between parental thoughts/actions and neural activation in mothers and fathers in the neonatal period with infant outcomes at the toddler stage. At the first month postpartum, mothers (n=21) and fathers (n=19) underwent a neuroimaging session during which they listened to their own and unfamiliar baby’s cry. Parenting-related thoughts/behaviors were assessed by interview twice at the first month and 3-4 months postpartum and infants’ socioemotional outcomes were reported by mothers and fathers at 18-24 months postpartum. In mothers, higher levels of anxious thoughts/actions about parenting at the first month postpartum, but not at 3-4 months postpartum, were associated with infant’s low socioemotional competencies at 18-24 months. Anxious thoughts/actions were also associated with heightened responses in the motor cortex and reduced responses in the substantia nigra to own infant cry sounds. On the other hand, in fathers, higher levels of positive perception of being a parent at the first month postpartum, but not at 3-4 months postpartum, were associated with higher infant socioemotional competencies at 18-24 months. Positive thoughts were associated with heightened responses in the auditory cortex and caudate to own infant cry sounds. The current study provides evidence that parental thoughts are related to concurrent neural responses to their infants at the first month postpartum as well as their infant’s future socioemotional outcome at 18-24 months. Parent differences suggest that anxious thoughts in mothers and positive thoughts in fathers may be the targets for parenting-focused interventions very early postpartum
Parental brain: cerebral areas activated by infant cries and faces. A comparison between different populations of parents and not.
Literature about parenting traditionally focused on caring behaviors and parental representations. Nowadays, an innovative line of research, interested in evaluating the neural areas and hormones implicated in the nurturing and caregiving responses, has developed. The only way to permit a newborn to survive and grow up is to respond to his needs and in order to succeed it is necessary, \ufb01rst of all, that the adults around him understand what his needs are. That is why adults\u2019 capacity of taking care of infants cannot disregard from some biological mechanisms, which allow them to be more responsive to the progeny and to infants in general. Many researches have proved that exist speci\ufb01c neural basis activating in response to infant evolutionary stimuli, such as infant cries and infant emotional facial expression. There is a sort of innate predisposition
in human adults to respond to infants\u2019 signals, in order to satisfy their need and allow them to survive and become young adults capable of taking care of themselves. This article focuses on research that has investigated, in the last decade, the neural circuits underlying parental behavioral responses. Moreover, the paper compares the results of those studies that investigated the neural responses to infant stimuli under different
conditions: familiar versus unknown children, parents versus non-parents and normative versus clinical samples (depression, addiction, adolescence, and PTSD)
Theories of the development of human communication
This article considers evidence for innate motives for sharing rituals and symbols from animal semiotics, developmental neurobiology, physiology of prospective motor control, affective neuroscience and infant communication. Mastery of speech and language depends on polyrhythmic movements in narrative activities of many forms. Infants display intentional activity with feeling and sensitivity for the contingent reactions of other persons. Talk shares many of its generative powers with music and the other ‘imitative arts’. Its special adaptations concern the capacity to produce and learn an endless range of sounds to label discrete learned understandings, topics and projects of intended movement
An Adaptive Locally Connected Neuron Model: Focusing Neuron
This paper presents a new artificial neuron model capable of learning its
receptive field in the topological domain of inputs. The model provides
adaptive and differentiable local connectivity (plasticity) applicable to any
domain. It requires no other tool than the backpropagation algorithm to learn
its parameters which control the receptive field locations and apertures. This
research explores whether this ability makes the neuron focus on informative
inputs and yields any advantage over fully connected neurons. The experiments
include tests of focusing neuron networks of one or two hidden layers on
synthetic and well-known image recognition data sets. The results demonstrated
that the focusing neurons can move their receptive fields towards more
informative inputs. In the simple two-hidden layer networks, the focusing
layers outperformed the dense layers in the classification of the 2D spatial
data sets. Moreover, the focusing networks performed better than the dense
networks even when 70 of the weights were pruned. The tests on
convolutional networks revealed that using focusing layers instead of dense
layers for the classification of convolutional features may work better in some
data sets.Comment: 45 pages, a national patent filed, submitted to Turkish Patent
Office, No: -2017/17601, Date: 09.11.201
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Troubling children's families: who's troubled and why? Approaches to inter-cultural dialogue
This article draws on multi-disciplinary perspectives to consider the need and the possibilities for inter-cultural dialogue concerning families that may be seen by some to be ‘troubling’. Starting from the premise that ‘troubles’ are a ‘normal’ part of children’s family lives, we consider the boundary between ‘normal’ troubles and troubles that are troubling (whether to family members or others). Such troubling families potentially indicate an intervention to prevent harm to less powerful family members (notably children). On what basis can such decisions be made in children’s family lives, how can this question be answered across diverse cultural contexts, and are all answers inevitably subject to uncertainty? Such questions arguably re-frame and broaden existing debates about ‘child maltreatment’ across diverse cultural contexts. Beyond recognizing power dynamics, material inequalities, and historical and contemporary colonialism, we argue that attempts to answer the question on an empirical basis risk a form of neo-colonialism, since values inevitably permeate research and knowledge claims. We briefly exemplify such difficulties, examining psychological studies of childrearing in China, and the application of neuroscience to early childhood interventions in the UK. Turning to issues of values and moral relativism, we also question the possibility of an objective moral standard that avoids cultural imperialism, but ask whether cultural relativism is the only alternative position available. Here we briefly explore other possibilities in the space between ‘facile’ universalism and ‘lazy’ relativism (Jullien, 2008/2014). Such approaches bring into focus core philosophical and cultural questions about the possibilities for ‘happiness’, and for what it means to be a ‘person’, living in the social world. Throughout, we centralize theoretical and conceptual issues, drawing on the work of Jullien (2008/2014) to recognize the immense complexities inter-cultural dialogue entails in terms of language and communication
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