84 research outputs found
Brain Electrical Activity in Infants of Depressed and Anxious Mothers
Numerous studies suggest that positive and negative emotions are associated with different patterns of cerebral hemisphere activation and that specific patterns of electroencephalographic (EEG) asymmetry may indicate risk for depression and anxiety. The extant developmental psychopathology literature has examined patterns of EEG asymmetry in the offspring of parents with affective disorders and such research has reported linkages between frontal EEG asymmetry and depression, suggesting that measures of EEG asymmetry may be important neurological markers of risk for affective disorders. Despite the greater prevalence of anxiety disorders than depressive disorders and the literature suggesting that resting EEG asymmetry may serve as an index of both depression and anxiety, no research has yet examined patterns of EEG asymmetry in the offspring of parents with anxiety disorders. The purpose of the present study was to examine early markers of risk for psychopathology in the biological domain (e.g., patterns of EEG asymmetry) in an attempt to elucidate some of the precursors of anxiety and depression in children so that we might gain a better understanding of the development of these disorders.
The present investigation examined the relation between maternal history of depression and anxiety and patterns of EEG asymmetry in infant offspring. EEG measures of alpha power (4-6 Hz) in the right and left hemisphere were recorded in infants (four to eight months of age) of mothers with a documented history of major depressive disorder (n = 39), anxiety disorder (n = 22), and comparison subjects (n = 38) during a resting baseline task. Results suggest that maternal depression and maternal anxiety was statistically unrelated to patterns of infant asymmetry. The results suggested that fewer infants of mothers with specific phobia (with and without depression) had right mid-parietal asymmetry than infants of control mothers. Perceived social support was related to patterns of infant EEG asymmetry. These findings provide modest support for the hypothesis that maternal diagnostic history may be related to patterns of infant asymmetry in various regions of the brain during a resting state
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Learning to Obtain Reward, but Not Avoid Punishment, Is Affected by Presence of PTSD Symptoms in Male Veterans: Empirical Data and Computational Model
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms include behavioral avoidance which is acquired and tends to increase with time. This avoidance may represent a general learning bias; indeed, individuals with PTSD are often faster than controls on acquiring conditioned responses based on physiologically-aversive feedback. However, it is not clear whether this learning bias extends to cognitive feedback, or to learning from both reward and punishment. Here, male veterans with self-reported current, severe PTSD symptoms (PTSS group) or with few or no PTSD symptoms (control group) completed a probabilistic classification task that included both reward-based and punishment-based trials, where feedback could take the form of reward, punishment, or an ambiguous “no-feedback” outcome that could signal either successful avoidance of punishment or failure to obtain reward. The PTSS group outperformed the control group in total points obtained; the PTSS group specifically performed better than the control group on reward-based trials, with no difference on punishment-based trials. To better understand possible mechanisms underlying observed performance, we used a reinforcement learning model of the task, and applied maximum likelihood estimation techniques to derive estimated parameters describing individual participants’ behavior. Estimations of the reinforcement value of the no-feedback outcome were significantly greater in the control group than the PTSS group, suggesting that the control group was more likely to value this outcome as positively reinforcing (i.e., signaling successful avoidance of punishment). This is consistent with the control group’s generally poorer performance on reward trials, where reward feedback was to be obtained in preference to the no-feedback outcome. Differences in the interpretation of ambiguous feedback may contribute to the facilitated reinforcement learning often observed in PTSD patients, and may in turn provide new insight into how pathological behaviors are acquired and maintained in PTSD
Efficacy of informal peace committees to peacebuilding: Evidence from Seke district, Zimbabwe
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