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Article summary with Malleability, plasticity, and individuality: How children learn and develop in context by Cantor a.o. - 2018
...........Read moreArticle summary with The mechanisms and moderators of “Fade-Out”: Towards understanding why the skills of early childhood program participants converge over time with the skills of other children by Abenavoli - 2019
...........Read moreThere is a rapid and massive increase in the total brain volume during the first year. The elaboration of cortical gyrification continues. Some histogenetic processes rapidly increase in intensity (such as synaptogenesis and dendritic differentiation), while others follow a steady pace (such as cytoarchitectonig development, neurochemical maturation, and myelination). There is a decline in the growth of axonal pathways.
The cerebral hemispheres continue to grow. The most intense histogenetic and neurogenetic events during this period are morphological differentiation of neurons and dendrites, synaptogenesis, myelination, and changes in cortical cytoarchitectonics.
Motor behavior includes every kind of movement from involuntary twitches to goal-directed actions in every part of the body, in every physical and social context, from the beginning of life until the end. Movements depend on generating, controlling, and exploiting physical forces, and on core psychological functions. Perception and cognition are necessary to plan and guide motor behavior. Social and cultural factors spur and constrain motor behaviors.
According to a developmental systems view, motor behaviors need to be viewed in the bodily, environmental, and social/cultural context in which they occur. New motor skills bring new parts of the environment into play and provide new opportunities for learning and doing. Differences in the way caregivers structure the environment and interact with their children affect the form of new skills, the ages when they first appear, and the shape of their developmental trajectory.
Posture is the position in which the body is held while standing, sitting, or lying down. It is the most important motor action, because it is the foundation upon which the other motor skills are built. The emergence of most skills need to wait for the development of sufficient postural control. Posture must be sufficiently stable to allow movement of the extremities. Maintaining a stable posture sets up the necessary conditions for looking around, handling objects, going somewhere, or having conversations.
As infants learn to control their posture, they start to have many more opportunities to learn. Independent sitting facilitates more sophisticated bimanual object exploration, such as fingering, transferring, and rotating, which facilitates learning about the three-dimensionality of objects. Infants also start to have more attention for changes in object appearance, object size, multimodal information about objects, and other people´s intentions to grasp objects.
Generally speaking, infants go through a top down progression. They gain increasing control from head to toe, from the head, neck, shoulders, waist, to the hips. They eventually learn to tripod sit: sitting by stabilizing their torso with their arms between their outstretched legs. They then learn to sit independently without their hands supporting them, eventually gaining sufficient stability to manage destabilizing forces caused by turning the head, twisting the torso, and moving the arms.
Dynamic postural control is the ability to maintain the center of mass within the base of support while the body is subjected to internal or external perturbations that are anticipated or not.
Sometimes postures appear stationary, but they are not. The body gently sways back and forth within the base of support. A sway in one direction must be met by a muscle-induced compensatory sway in the opposite direction. Infant´s compensatory sways are excessive and they often stagger and fall. Visual information for body sway is extremely powerful, and infants are learning to use visual information for postural control.
Locomotion refers to movement or the ability to move from one place to another. Locomotion is not reflexive or hardwired, but improves with practice. Infants find different ways to solve the problem of moving and often come up with different creative solutions. Generating new forms of locomotion can involve cognitive skills such as problem solving, representing goals and spatial locations, and tool use.
When newborn are held upright with their feet on a hard surface, they move their legs in an alternating pattern that resembles walking. This is called the newborn stepping reflex. It usually disappears by two months of age and reappears at eight to ten months when infants begin walking with support. The reflex is caused as a newborns response to optic flow. Infants can deliberately modify their leg movements in various configurations that can be kinematically equivalent and produced by the same muscle, though they may look different. In reality, with daily practice in an upright posture, the stepping movements never disappear.
On average, infants take their first walking steps at twelve months. Walking onset requires sufficient strength and balance to support the body on one leg as the other leg swings forward. Experience in standing, stepping, and moving upright facilitates gains in strength and balance and accelerates the onset of walking. The first steps are wobbly and uneven, with a wide stance between feet, a small front-to-back distance between steps, long periods when both feet are on the floor, and short periods when one foot is in the air. Children rapidly improve their walking skills as they discover the relevant parameters that control upright balance and propulsion.
Children generate the requisite perceptual information through exploratory movements, such as looking, touching, and testing various options. Learning does not transfer from earlier to later developing postures. Infants learn to generate and use perceptual information about the current status of their body relevant to the environment. They learn the relevant parameters for each new posture in development and the relevant exploratory behaviors for calibrating those parameters in new situations. Over weeks of experience with each posture, judgements improve so that infants attempt safe increments within their ability and avoid risky obstacles beyond their ability.
The hands are used in a wide range of actions such as feeding, locomotion, body maintenance, communication, and play. Manual actions begin prenatally, but outside the womb, infants require a stable postural base to support arm movements and perceptual information to guide movements adaptively. Tools extend children´s manual abilities.
Manual action appears long before birth. Fetuses can extend their arms, wiggle their fingers, clench their fists, explore their own bodies, such their thumbs, etc. Spontaneous arm and hand movements continue after birth.
Goal-directed reaching requires perceptual information about the location of the object vis-à-vis the hand. Initially reaches are jerky and crooked and it takes years before children´s reaches become as smooth and straight as those of an adult. Jerky trajectories may result in part from postural constraints and unanticipated reactive forces. Reaching precedes grabbing, because control of the arms precedes control of the hands. Prospective control of grasping based on visual information for object size, orientation, and substance appears months after infants begin reaching. With increased hand/finger control, infants adapt their grip configuration to object properties, but they do so after contacting the object, not during the reach.
With increasing skill, object exploration becomes increasingly multi-modal. At first, infants use their hands only to be able to look and mouth an object. As their grip strengthens, they can heft, rub, squeeze, and finger objects, as well as transfer objects from hand to hand and rotate them in front of their eyes. Hands begin to serve a complementary function. They can use one hand to support the object and keep it in view, while using the other to generate information about the object properties.
Tool use has its roots in early motor actions and relies on motor actions for its execution. Exploring relations between objects and surfaces sets the stage for using objects as effective tools. Tool use requires infants to perceive that a goal is beyond their abilities and to recognize that an object can serve as a means to augment their abilities. Then they need to execute the necessary movements to use the tool.
All the parts of the face begin moving prenatally. After birth, infants continue to produce facial movements as they become integral to everyday functions. Swallowing is used to suckling, eating, and talking. Vocalizations and facial expressions are used for communication. Head and eye movements are used for visual exploration of the environment.
Newborns must coordinate movements of the tongue, jaws, and lips to create suction, draw liquid into the mouth, pull the liquid into the pharynx, and divert the liquid to the esophagus while pulling air into the trachea. Chewing is more complicated. Infants rely on lateral jaw movements to do most of the chewing, whereas older children use rotary jaw movements and use the lips and tongue. Infants use the same chewing movements regardless of the type of food, whereas older children select the appropriate jaw movements and muscle forces based on the food consistency.
Facial expressions and vocalizations appear long before infants can speak. The movements needed for speech production are one of the most complex movements to learn. The jaws, lips, and tongue must be precisely positioned to shape each sound as air travels through the oral and nasal cavities. Infants rely primarily on jaw movements as they discover functional strategies to produce speech sound. As they gain better control over their lips and learn to incorporate those movements into the jaw movements, they are able to produce a greater variety of speech sounds.
Looking involves coordination among body, head, and eyes. Newborns who cannot turn their heads tend to watch whatever happens to be in front of them. Even as posture improves, much of what infants see is opportunistic. Looking is more functional and adaptive when the eye, head, and body movements are more controlled. To track a moving object, infants must anticipate its speed and trajectory to keep their eyes moving at the right pace. As targets move too quickly, the eyes lag behind, and infants often make corrective saccades to catch up to the target. With practice, they use less corrective saccades.
The period until the age of 2 years old is characterised by the most dynamic period of brain development. From birth to 2 years of age, the overall brain size increases dramatically, reaching close to 90% of adult volume by the age of 2 years. The gray matter volume also reaches a lifetime maximum at around 2 years of age. These structural changes in the brain are accompanied by the process of brain circuit formation, as a result of neurogenesis, neuronal migration, synapse formation, dendritic arborisation, axonal growth, pruning and myelination. These processes shape the structural and functional architecture of the human brain.
Despite the significant contribution of histological studies to understanding typical and atypical brain development, these studies are relatively labor-intensive and time-consuming and may not be suitable for surveying the entire brain. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to reveal the global maturation pattern of the white matter or the cerebral cortex with histological approaches alone. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques, on the other hand, are able to survey the entire brain in a very time-efficient way.
As a consequence of recent developments, the diffusion MRI (DTI) technique has become an effective probe to qualitatively and quantitatively characterize brain tissue microstructure, white matter tract anatomy and the structural connectivity of developing human brain. T1 weighted and T2 weighted imaging, relaxometry MRI and MTI have provided other options to image the developing brain.
We distinguish different types of MRI techniques that we can use to image the brain: diffusion MRI, diffusion tensor imaging, diffusion MRI-based tractography, T1 and T2 relaxometry and approaches based on magnetization transfer.
Gray matter are metaphorically also thought of as information processing hubs, and white matter acts as a long-range communication and transmission systems. For several decades, the architecture of white matter has been imaged in histological studies of postmortem brains. The recent developments within the field of MRI techniques have led to the opportunity to image how certain connections emerge at the beginning of life and how the maturational trajectories of white matter tracts in typical development look like. The major white matter tracts in the human brain can be categorised into five functional categories: limbic, commissural, projection, association and brainstem tract groups. Using DTI studies, erogeneous emergence patterns of white matter across different tracts and tract groups were observed. Significant micro-structural changes of white matter tracts take place during the fetal stage. Inhomogeneous but organized myelination processes have been found to be possibly contributing to a reshuffled inter-tract correlation pattern and strengthening of the correlation of homologous tracts from neonates to children around puberty.
A variety of advanced dMRI techniques have also been used in the study of white matter maturation. T1 and T2 decrease with developmental processes, and specifically more strongly in white matter than in gray matter because of the myelination. T1 and T2 drops are particularly rapid over the two first years of life. MTR increases during white matter maturation, following an exponential time course. To better understand the cellular processes underlying white matter maturation in terms of axonal growth, organisation and myelination, biophysical models have been proposed. These models aim to link these cellular processes to the DTI-derived measurement changes during early brain development.
Gray matter also develops rapidly in the fetal and infant stages. It has been shown in neurological research using structural MRI that the cortical gray matter volume in the human brain increases more than 4-fold in the short period of the 3rd trimester. Furthermore, gray matter volume increases 1.5-fold in the first two years of postnatal life. During cortical development, the majority of cortical neurons are generated near the cerebral ventricles and migrate towards the cortical surface along a radially arranged scaffolding of glial cells. In the fetal and preterm stage of development, the frontal lobe of the human brain appears to be relatively immature, as it displays less dendritic arborisation, synaptic formation and cellular differentiation. The maturation pattern of cortical FA and MD is rather heterogeneous. This finding may be used to infer the complicated but precisely organised cellular and molecular processes during cortical maturation.
Marked microstructural changes are also observed in central gray nuclei throughout a young child's development. Microstructural changes that can be observed using the DTI technique suggest that membrane proliferation and fiber myelination processes are intense in the developing deep gray matter of the baby brain.
Exciting developments in defining the developmental changes of whole-brain connectivity have been achieved by applying graph theory to diffusion tractography of white matter and resting state fMRI of gray matter. In network analysis of the structural connectome, the gray matter regions represent the “nodes” and the white matter connections between different nodes represent the “edges”. It is beyond the scope of this article to comprehensively review this rapidly evolving field.
On this basis of this research, several conclusions can be drawn:
Article summary with Hormonal changes associated with intra-uterine growth restriction: Impact on the developing brain and future neurodevelopment by Baud & Berkane - 2019
...........Read moreArticle summary with A systematic review of targeted social and emotional learning interventions in early childhood education and care settings by Blewitt a.o. - 2019
...........Read moreArticle summary with Annual Research Review: DNA methylation as a mediator in the association between risk exposure and child and adolescent psychopathology by Barker a.o. - 2018
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Article summary with Neural substrates of early executive function development by Fiske & Holmboe - 2019
...........Read moreArticle summary with Developmental origins of the human hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis by Howland a.o. - 2017
...........Read moreArticle summary with Executive function in the first three years of life: precursors, predictors and patterns by Hendry a.o. - 2016
...........Read moreMany medical conditions are associated with poorer quality of life and adverse emotional and behavioral outcomes in children. The multiple systems that children are embedded within are often disrupted during illness, altering the typical course of development, which can further exacerbate symptoms and their consequences. These potentially negative implications for child well-being can be viewed as an opportunity to enhance the psychosocial context and improve pediatric outcomes. The gut microbiome refers to the vast and diverse array of microorganisms residing in the gastrointestinal tract and their collective genomes. There is evidence that it contributes to both physical and mental health.
Research results have indicated several associations between the microbiome and physical and mental health:
No consistent pattern emerged. The gut microbiome differences at baseline and following interventions varied across studies and depended on the physical health condition and type of analysis conducted.
Article summary with Early life stress and brain function: Activity and connectivity associated with processing emotion and reward by Herzberg & Gunnar - 2020
...........Read moreNeuroplacentology is the field that investigates placental connections to neurodevelopmental outcomes. Many evens can abruptly change the fetal´s brain environment. The developmental potential of the fetus can be compromised when the placenta fails to function properly. Placental failure can directly damage the developing brain or increase its susceptibility to injury, leading to permanent neurological disabilities.
Fetal programming suggests that certain events occurring during critical points of pregnancy may cause permanent effects on the fetus and infant long after birth. Maternal health, nutrition, exposure to environmental factors, uteroplacental blood flow, placental transfer, and fetal genetic and epigenetic responses all contribute to programming.
At certain point the embryo and fetus are more vulnerable to stressful events and the impact of those events will vary depending on when they occur during gestation. Several placental events are distinguished:
Research suggests a correlation between placental architecture and later ASD. Studies examining the placenta of mothers who were at higher risk of having a child with autism revealed anatomical variations, such as fewer branch points, thicker and less tortuous arteries, better extension to the surface boundary, smaller branch angles, and thicker and rounder placentas. The correlations suggest that placentas may reflect or create an adverse environment for fetal brain development. Other studies suggest a link between placental epigenetic modification to ASD, for example through pesticide exposures that alter placental DNA methylation and vitamin D deficiency.
Research suggests an association between maternal viral illnesses in early gestation with later development of schizophrenia in the child. Maternal infection may permanently affect the placenta and fetus either through altered gene expression or epigenetic modification. There is also a genetic risk for schizophrenia. A subset of the most significant genetic variants associated with schizophrenia, combined with the ability of the brain cells to respond to stress, may determine the final phenotype.
The developing brain is very sensitive to glucocorticoids which play an important role in neuronal maturation. Many maternal stressors, such as depression, trauma, and malnutrition, can alter maternal glucocorticoid levels and affect the placenta. Also, poor placental function that is associated with IUGR can alter fetal glucocorticoid exposure. Maternal mood disorders are associated with disruption of placental enzymes that regulate maternal-fetal glucocorticoid and serotonin transfer. This may lead to abnormal neurodevelopment and potentially to mood disorders in the child.
Research shows that learning difficulties and behavioral problems are significantly associated with deficits in executive functioning and are thought to be caused by prefrontal lobe dysfunction. Especially premature neonates show executive function deficits in childhood or adult life. There are differences between late premature neonates that were medically and purposely delivered versus those that were spontaneously born. Those who were delivered for medical indications had higher levels of childhood attention problems. It suggests that pregnancy complications that motivated medical intervention, complications that are primarily due to placental dysfunction and fetal growth restriction, can increase the risk of executive functioning deficits.
Humans are a social species. Sociality is evolutionarily related to allostasis. Allostasis refers to the ongoing adjustment of an individual’s internal milieu that is necessary for survival, growth and reproduction. Social animals gradually learn to regulate their own and others’ allostasis using social communication. The literature indicates that across different species, higher allostatic demands are associated with more complex sociality. A caregiver’s allostatic support is rewarding, which makes social interactions a strong reinforcement for youngsters. With repeated care, the infant gradually builds an internal model of the caregiver. As the experience with the caregiver is repeatedly associated with a vigorous reward, it is hypothesized that the internal model of the caregiver is acquired as rewarding, which promotes infant attachment and motivation towards social interactions.
It is proposed that neural systems that support human social behaviours overlap with those supporting allostasis. The neural circuitry that is needed for social affiliation is not evident in newborns, and develops throughout childhood. It is proposed that this potentiates a child's susceptibility to environmental input. Brain development and social development may be two manifestations of the same phenomenon: namely that of becoming social experts.
The salience and default mode networks of the brain together make up an integrated network for implementing allostasis. The core intrinsic networks and hubs, specifically those in the default mode and salience networks, have been repeatedly demonstrated to participate in social brain processing. Examples of processes that can be described as social brain processing are maternal bonding, social cognition and social network size. These brain processes impaired in patients with social deficits such as in autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). Evidence from human neuroimaging studies suggests that there is an overlap between the neural system that supports social behaviours and the one that supports allostasis.
Human brain development is a protracted process that starts in utero and lasts for up to 25 years postnatal. The myelination of the long-distance axon tracts that allow for the fast, efficient information transfer throughout the networks of the brain, develops for the most part after birth. In general, sensory and motor-control networks become synchronized early in life and even during the prenatal period. However, major nodes of the default mode network continue to develop until young adulthood.
Research has established that provision of early life care shapes brain anatomy. Early social care also appears to determine the behavioural phenotype of the off-spring. Variation in maternal behaviour impacts children’s social development. It is hypothesised that infants will show facilitated network development when their allostatic needs are sensitively regulated. This hypothesis is supported by literature demonstrating that child development is optimized and even accelerated where provision of parental care is sensitively attuned to the infant needs.
A key feature of the predictive coding model is the interaction between the forward and backward flow of information: The backward flow delivers predictions while the forward flow computes the residual errors between prediction and sensory inputs. In early life as infants’ sensory pathways become intact, without sufficient sensory experience to form valid predictive models, most sensory input is considered ‘prediction error’, simply because the brain cannot predict it. Of special importance for the development of sociality is neural prediction within the interoceptive system, which is the sensory consequence of allostasis. A recent comparative study supports the importance of maternal care predictability by demonstrating that when infants can predict maternal sensory input, they can develop optimally.
With development, it is hypothesised that as top-down predictive models gradually govern infants’ experience, infants’ allostasis and allostatic independence will exponentially increase. This process might involve a gradual decrease in the salience of interoceptive prediction errors. It is also hypothesised that infants’ experience mostly includes bottom-up information, or prediction errors.
The amygdala, nucleus accumbens and hypothalamus are considered key regions in social processing. They also have a key role in allostasis regulation and are thought to compute prediction error and motivate behaviour. It is hypothesized that these regions’ involvement in social processing reflects an underlying process of preparing the organism for upcoming changes in allostasis.
The mental representations of categories in the brain are referred to as concepts. It has been proposed that when the brain assembles populations of predictions, it is constructing concepts. Every event of new learning is categorised into a concept.
The first step in social development is acquisition of rudimentary social concepts. During early infancy, the infant gains experience interacting with the caretaker, and most interactions will be implicitly or explicitly aimed towards allostasis regulation. Through social regulation of allostasis, a child experientially acquires not only social concepts but also social competencies. One of the basic social competencies infants gain is synchrony. Bio-behavioural synchrony is an important aspect of mother–infant attachment, and has been shown to be important for shaping optimal developmental outcomes of physiological regulation, executive functions and social aptitude. Starting from gestation, a mother controls her foetus’s allostasis via mother–foetus physiological synchronization processes, such as synchronising heart rates and body temperature.
Infants learn conceptual knowledge by synchronizing their attention with others. It is hypothesised that stimuli with a higher predictive value for allostasis will be learned quicker than stimuli with lower impact on allostasis. During development, infants learn social concepts and skills to prepare for allostatic needs, as caretakers introduce all the culturally relevant concepts using language. In addition to social learning, allostasis-driven learning can also shape other human features such as cognition, emotion and culture. Emotion and social concepts are environmentally constructed in each culture, and transferred between generations in social dyads during early life social training.
The neural trajectories of social development are not yet well-understood in neurological research. Of specific interest to social cognition is the temporal contingency between the developmental trajectories of the default mode network and of cognitive abilities such as conceptualization. The default mode network is believed to construct mental representations of concepts, including complex representations about other people’s minds. most of the core nodes of the default mode network become synchronized by six months of age. The grey matter volumes as well as functional and structural connectivity in the default mode network continue to develop during childhood, reaching full maturity in late adolescence.
Social care controls social and cognitive development via maturation of whole-brain neural networks. Parental care, which is consistently reinforced by allostasis, is necessary for the infant to build and refine a multisensory mental representation of concepts. Early life is a critical window for social learning due to the acute nature of the social dependency. The potentially crucial role of social experience during infancy in shaping brain and social development suggests that social animals do not necessarily rely on a predetermined specialized brain system to support affiliation. Instead, domain-general neural systems implement a conceptual system to regulate allostasis, and that underlies social behaviour.
Through social interactions, humans learn to link those abstract concepts to their allostasis to survive and prosper in their culture. This can potentially explain how beyond the immediate dyadic bond with the caregiver, extended social effects, including social class or economic status, may carry powerful effects on child development and even brain development.
Article summary with Autism as an adaptive common variant pathway for human brain development by Johnson - 2017
...........Read moreArticle summary with Concern for others in the first year of life: Theory, evidence, and avenues for research by Davidov a.o. - 2013
...........Read moreArticle summary with The neurobiology of human attachments by Feldman - 2017
...........Read moreArticle summary with The body comes first. Embodied reparation and the co-creation of infant bodily-self by Montirosso & McGlone - 2020
...........Read moreArticle summary with Understanding the development of face and emotion processing under a predictive processing framework by Pereira a.o. - 2019
...........Read moreArticle summary with Making sense of the world: Infant learning from a predictive processing perspective by Köster a.o. - 2020
...........Read moreArticle summary with The relationships between screen use and health indicators among infants, toddlers, and preschoolers: A meta-analysis and systematic review by Li a.o. - 2020
...........Read moreArticle summary with The neuroscience of socioeconomic inequality by Noble & Giebler - 2020
...........Read moreArticle summary with Linking language and cognition in infancy by Perszyk & Waxman - 2018
...........Read morePreterm birth is defined as a birth at less than 37 week's gestation. It is common and responsible for global child mortality. Researchers have become interested in the long-term outcomes of preterm birth and found some interesting links between preterm birth and cognitive and psychological outcomes. On average, children born preterm were found to experience poorer mental health and educational outcomes compared to their term-born peers. Pre-term birth is also associated with lower IQ scores. Difficulties with executive functioning, processing speed, verbal fluency, cognitive flexibility and working memory may underlie the poorer cognitive and academic performance of individuals who were born preterm. These cognitive outcomes appear to be rather stable over life. Especially problems with mathematics have been linked to preterm birth. Preterm birth also increases the likelihood of neurodevelopmental and certain mental health difficulties. Children born very preterm have, on average, poorer attention and more social- communication difficulties, peer problems, and internalising symptoms than their term-born peers. Links between preterm birth and depression during childhood are less clear. However, cohort study data for young adults born at extremely low birth-weights (
For individuals born preterm, brain maturation outside of the uterine milieu, common medical complications, plus separation from parents due to hospitalisation may contribute to lasting changes in brain and autonomic development. The period between the current threshold of viability (22– 24 weeks) and term (40 weeks) is a stage when the brain is developing rapidly. In infants born preterm, this part of brain development in an atypical extra-uterine biological milieu. This leads to alterations in cortical development.
The impact of preterm birth on brain development may actually persists into adulthood. Studies have identified structural differences, including reduced cortical gyrification, alterations in network connectivity and changes in the trajectory of cerebral development. Daily skin-to-skin care, during which the infant is placed unclothed on the mother’s or father’s chest, improves child autonomic and circadian development, maternal attachment behaviour, and mother-infant synchrony compared to standard incubator care. At age 10, babies who received kangaroo care show bet- ter resilience to social and emotional stress, better sleep organisation and better executive function- ing compared to incubator care controls. Facilitating parental presence in the NICU may therefore promote better long-term outcomes for preterm babies.
Psychosocial factors, from socioeconomic status to parenting, peer relationships, and bullying victimisation have a significant impact on long-term outcomes for preterm-born children. Parental sensitivity appears to be a key factor linked to positive developmental outcomes. Responsive and involved parenting of babies in the NICU has also been linked to higher IQ scores in adults born very preterm. Children born preterm appear to be particularly susceptible to certain forms of psychosocial adversity. The detrimental impact of low parental sensitivity appears to be greater in preterm compared to term-born children. Cohort study data also suggest that adults born extremely preterm are more susceptible than term born adults to mental health problems when they have experienced psychosocial adversity. Children born very or extremely preterm are at least three times as likely to be chronically bullied during childhood compared to their term-born counterparts.
Difficulties with working memory in preterm-born children may lead to problems with mental arithmetic, and deficits across a range of executive functions have been shown to mediate the relationship between preterm birth and attainment at school. Cognitive and learning difficulties may form part of a cascade leading to poorer educational outcomes.
In conclusion, preterm birth appears to have a lasting impact on child educational and mental health outcomes. Parent-led organisations have started advocating for greater recognition of and research into the ongoing impact of preterm birth. More work is needed to identify fruitful interventions or support strategies to ensure that preterm-born children achieve their potential. Affecting nearly 15 million children born annually worldwide, preterm birth deserves more attention as a significant and potentially modifiable risk factor for poorer educational and mental health outcomes.
Article summary with The role of the motor system in action understanding and communication: Evidence from human infants and non-primates by Salo a.o. - 2018
...........Read moreArticle summary with The role of the visual association cortex in scaffolding prefrontal cortex development: A novel mechanism linking socioeconomic status and executive function by Rosen a.o. - 2019
...........Read moreArticle summary with Walk like me, talk like me. The connection between mirror neurons and autism spectrum disorder by Saffin & Tohid - 2020
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...........Read moreArticle summary with Annual Research Review: Umbrella synthesis of meta-analyses on child maltreatment antecedents and interventions: differential susceptibility perspective on risk and resilience by Van IJzendoorn a.o. - 2020
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...........Read morePreterm birth and low birth weight co-occur frequently. Many children born preterm are also born with a low birth weight and vice versa. These children are at high risk of adverse cognitive, academic, and behavioral outcomes. They often show impairments in executive functions, which play a crucial role in the onset of academic and behavioral problems.
Children born preterm/low birth weight scored lower on working memory and cognitive flexibility measures, as well as inhibition measures. There were no differences between these executive functions, meaning that they were all affected to a similar degree. In previous research, executive function deficits have been described to be proportional to decreasing gestational age, but those studies featured children at the extreme ends of the gestational age range. More research is necessary, specifically including children born extremely preterm.
Researchers are investigating whether or not executive function deficits in children born preterm or with low birth weight represent a stable deficit, meaning a deficit that increases during development, or a delay in maturation in which children catch up over time. In the current research, the difficulties appear to be stable and do not diminish as the children grow older. However, the children examined were no older than 14 years, and it´s possible that there may be catch up in executive functions after that age.
Article summary with The neurodevelopment of autism from infancy through toddlerhood by Girault & Piven - 2020
...........Read moreArticle summary with A systematic review of reviews of the outcome of noninstitutional child maltreatment by Carr a.o. - 2020
...........Read moreArticle summary with Temperamental vulnerability to emotion dysregulation and risk for mental and physical health challenges by Calkins & Dollar - 2019
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...........Read moreMost of the children who receive psychiatric care are in therapy because of disruptive behaviours. Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) and Conduct Disorder (CD) are the best examples of diagnoses of clinically disruptive behavioural patterns. Early identification and treatment of children with disruptive behaviour disorders is crucial. There are great differences in the frequency, intensity and kind of symptoms that mark the onset of the disorder. Almost all children with CD also have an ODD diagnosis. Comorbid ADHD is also very prevalent among children with disruptive behaviour disorders.
Several different environmental as well as genetic factors can contribute to the risk of developing a disruptive behaviour disorder.
The clearest case of an environmental exposure that predisposes to DBDs is exposure to active maternal smoking during pregnancy. Children from economically disadvantaged neighborhoods manifest DBDs more often, a phenomenon that is referred to as the neighborhood effect. Neighborhood disadvantage is also associated with exposure to neighborhood violence, which independently increases DBD risk. Children exposed to chronic violence also have faulty processing of interpersonal cues, with more negative and hostile attributions about others’ behavior, leading to increased aggression. There are indirect associations between family income and children’s behavioral problems mediated by maternal depression and parental stress: Exposure to maternal depression during infancy increases preschool children’s likelihood of developing DBDs, likely mediated by the effects of disengaged, harsh, or overly permissive parenting. Parental stress is another environmental risk factor for developing a disruptive behaviour disorder.
Positive parenting techniques include close monitoring of the child, positive reinforcement, and regular engagement. These techniques are associated with decreased DBD risk, and are taught in parent management training programs used for prevention and treatment of preschool ODD and CD.
Disruptive behaviour disorders cluster in families with ADHD, CD, ODD and depression. Recent studies have also investigated genetic polymorphisms that may predispose to DBDs through interaction with childhood adversity. Polymorphisms in the 5-hy- droxy-tryptamine transporter–linked polymorphic region (5HTTLPR) and monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene are the most intensely investigated. The S allele results in decreased production of serotonin transporters, and thus decreased serotonin clearance from the synaptic cleft. Although not all research supports this finding, some 5HTTLPR studies found that the S allele increases vulnerability to externalizing disorders in the context of childhood adversity.
Disruptive behaviour disorders are accompanied with certain structural and functional abnormalities in the brain. There has not been executed a lot of research towards the brain structural and functional abnormalities in children with a disruptive behaviour disorder. However, it was established that children with ODD and CD have smaller bilateral amygdalae and insulae, as well as decreased brain activity in these areas on functional MRI. Decreased volume in the right striatum, left medial and superior frontal gyrus, and left precuneus were also found. Children with comborbid ADHD and ODD display decreased response inhibition and working memory. Children with a disruptive behaviour disorder also display more risk-taking behaviours. This behaviour is associated with decreased orbitofrontal cortex reactivity to reward in these children.
The Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment (ASEBA) is one of the most comprehensive report forms for assessment of DBDs, and there is a version for children 1.5 to 5 years of age. In addition to an ODD Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)–oriented scale and emotionally reactive and aggressive behavior syndrome scales, the ASEBA also screens for comorbid conditions. The Disruptive Behavior Diagnostic Observation Schedule is an observational method of assessing preschool disruptive behavior.
Psychosocial interventions are the first-line treatments for preschool DBDs. Examples are Parent Management Training-Oregon Model, parent-child interaction therapy and the IY program.
The Parent Management Training-Oregon Model (PMTO) focuses on training caregivers rather than focusing on the child directly. In the PMTO model, children’s disruptive behaviours result in part from parents’ unintentional reinforcement of children’s use of coercive methods to obtain what they want. The program involves a concerted effort to reshape parenting techniques, paring down reliance on coercion and focusing instead on positive reinforcement for prosocial behaviour.
Parent-child interaction therapy (PCIT) is a dyadic therapy method focusing on the ways in which parent-child interactions can improve parents’ and children’s abilities to regulate strong emotions. Parents learn ways to engage positively with their children via praise and reflection, and how to ignore negative behaviors
In the Incredible Years (IY) program, therapists observe parent-child interactions through a 1-way mirror, then discuss observed maladaptive interactional styles. In later sessions, therapists coach parents through interactions with their children, delivering instructions via earpiece.
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...........Read moreEmpathy refers to the capacity to comprehend the minds of others, to feel emotions outside our own, and to respond with concern, kindness, and care to others’ suffering. It is a relational construct and central in the formation and maintenance of social bonds. Individual differences in empathic ability and the tendency to be empathic have significant implications for social functioning across development:
In childhood, low empathy is associated with poor peer relationships, hostility, and bullying.
In adolescence, low empathy manifests in aggression and antisocial behaviour.
In adulthood, this deficit is associated with child abuse, violence, and psychopathy.
On the other hand, greater empathy is associated with social competence and prosocial behaviour across the lifespan. Individual differences in empathy result from the complex interweaving of a child’s biological predisposition and environment. Theories of empathic development have emphasized the role of parenting: Children’s level of empathy may be seen as a product of specific parenting behaviours such as authoritativeness, gentle discipline, inductive reasoning, and sensitive responding to children’s distress. In line with attachment theories, parents’ sensitive responses to children’s distress serve as a key antecedent to children’s healthy social and emotional development. Research demonstrates that behavioral and physiological indicators of self-regulation are positively associated with children’s empathy and prosocial behavior, whereas personal distress is negatively related or unassociated with empathy and prosociality.
According to attachment theories, infants’ expression of need, distress, or bids for closeness, referred to as attachment behaviors, are aimed at eliciting proximity, protection, and comfort of their attachment figures in times of threat, referred to as caregiving behaviours. Attachment theory states that all infants possess an adaptive, biologically based tendency to forge an attachment bond to a close caregiver, and that infants’ own social behavior will grow from the foundation of this primary relationship. These early patterns of interaction between infant and caregiver shape enduring mental representations of social relationships, what Bowlby termed internal working models (IWMs). IWMs organize cognitive processing of social information, inform emotional and physiological responses to threat, and guide social behavior across development. Secure and insecure IWMs differentially shape psychological functioning throughout childhood, with securely attached children consistently demonstrating greater social competence and better quality peer relationships than their insecure peers.
From an attachment perspective, we view empathy as arising out of the experience of relational security, in complex interaction with moderators at multiple levels of analysis. Cognitive models, language, emotional and self-regulatory capacities, neurobiological programming and parenting antecedents are mechanisms of influence in the relationship between early attachment and empathy.
In addition to socialization, attachment likely interacts with other moderating factors at multiple levels of analysis.
Importantly, each of the mediating and moderating processes described occur in the context of the developing child, and it is likely that the relation between attachment and empathy is developmentally constructed. The proposed link between attachment and empathy may be indirect, working through multiple mediating mechanisms in a cascade of influences over time. It also may take time for this relationship to consolidate, and therefore may be weakest in infancy, when children’s capacity for emotion regulation and cognitive representation are primitive.
Research on attachment and empathy in infants and toddlers to date is sparse, providing only preliminary evidence for a link between security and empathy in young children. The link between attachment and empathy is weakest in infancy, when representations and self-regulatory abilities are still consolidating.
As children enter the preschool years, their empathic capacities become increasingly selective, reflecting greater understanding of display rules, gender norms, and contextual factors such as group membership and the proximal causes for others’ distress. The evidence on attachment-related differences in empathy in preschool children is particularly mixed, and appears to depend upon study design and methodology: Longitudinal studies employing observational measures of children’s empathy have generally found that preschoolers with secure attachment histories are more likely to respond empathically to strangers and peers in distress. In contrast, mixed and null results have emerged from cross-sectional studies and studies assessing preschoolers’ empathy toward their mothers or siblings. The evidence from this developmental period suggests that attachment-related differences in empathy may indeed be developmentally constructed, with differences emerging principally from longitudinal investigations. Data also point to the importance of contextual and methodological moderators, given evidence that a child’s relationship to the target—as well characteristics of the target such as maternal mental health— represent important moderators of the link between attachment and empathy.
In early and middle childhood, the focus of children’s social world begins to shift toward peers, yet attachment to parents continues to influence children’s everyday interactions. Emotion regulation appears to be a key mechanism linking attachment with social functioning in middle childhood. Middle school students’ self-reports of attachment and empathy together were found to predict their role in bullying situations. Furthermore, insecure IWMs of attachment in early and middle childhood have been associated with increased risk for callous-unemotional traits, foremost among which are lack of empathy and poor attunement to others’ emotions.
The period of adolescence is marked by the increasing importance of peers, who may at times provide a secure base for the adolescent or call upon the adolescent to provide a secure base for them in times of distress. Adolescent research has consistently demonstrated a positive association between secure attachment and empathy. The majority of studies to date, however, have employed cross-sectional designs and self-report assessments of attachment and empathy, raising concerns regarding shared method variance and highlighting the need for more longitudinal, observational work in this developmental period. Nevertheless, this body of work helps to build a bridge linking earlier studies of attachment and empathy in childhood with the robust findings on security and empathy in adulthood. Across numerous studies utilizing a variety of methodologies, adult attachment researchers have repeatedly demonstrated an association between security and empathy for others in distress. The strong evidence in adulthood, coupled with the promising research in adolescence, suggest that studying the developmental roots of empathy from an attachment perspective is indeed a worthwhile pursuit.
The body of work examining attachment and empathy in childhood is surprisingly small, and the evidence is mixed. There are multiple possible explanations for these mixed findings.
Several directions can be advised for future research towards the development of empathy.
Empathy involves the vicarious experience of another person’s distress, which can precipitate prosocial acts of help. Both empathy and prosociality are fundamental to moral and social behavior. Children’s empathic concern for others and displays of prosocial behavior emerge by the second year of life. Research towards deficits in these processes to explain antisocial behaviour has focused on callous-unemotional (CU) behaviours.
Callous-unemotional behaviours in childhood are characterised by low empathy, low guilt, uncaring about others and low emotional responsively. It has been established that CU behaviours assessed as young as age 3 predict future behaviour problems. CU behaviours are characterised by homotypic continuity, which means that they remain constant over development.
A large developmental literature has linked parenting to the development of empathy and prosocial behaviour. Warm parenting is thought to encourage and scaffold emotional expression and sensitivity, and increase the likelihood that children internalize parental messages about empathy and prosociality. Negative parent-child relationships appear to amplify the risk that the development of empathy and conscience could fail. Greater parental warmth predicts decreases in CU behaviours across the preschool period, whereas parental harshness at age 2 predicts increases in CU behaviours at ages 4. However, also broader negative contexts can undermine child socioemotional development via effects on parenting. At the same time, genetically-informed studies suggest at least moderate heritability of CU behaviors in early childhood. Parenting is critical to the development of early CU behaviours. CU behaviors develop through a complex interplay between genes and environment.
Across several recent studies, early temperamental markers of CU behaviors have been identified. For example, children with CU behaviors show lower affection and eye contact with parents. Impairments in attending to, recognizing, and responding to interpersonal emotions as early as infancy may increase risk for CU behaviors. These impairments could contribute to deficits in the development of affective empathy. Empathy is commonly divided between emotionally resonating with the feelings of another, referred to as affective empathy, versus understanding the perspective of another, referred to as cognitive empathy. Evidence suggests that children high on CU behaviours have intact cognitive but impaired affective empathy both during the preschool period and in late-childhood.
In addition to emotional responsivity, a second temperament relevant for understanding CU behaviours is low fear. Early fearlessness confers low arousal to threat, which undermines learning about the consequences of behaviour, thus increasing risk for CU behaviours.
Drawing together research on parenting and child temperament, studies suggest that interactions between child temperament and parenting are critical in the development of moral emotions. Inherited child characteristics interact with caregiving to shape the development of empathy and prosocial behaviour and that person-context fit may be particularly important in the development of prosocial behaviours. Child temperament interacts with parental caregiving to increase or buffer risk for CU behaviours.
Based on this literature, we propose that early CU behaviours arise in the context of inherited temperament risk for both low interpersonal emotional sensitivity and fearlessness. It is hypothesized that CU behaviours arise from the interaction of two heritable pathways:
Inherited low interpersonal emotional sensitivity sets the foundation for failure to develop affective empathy, operationalized via low emotional contagion in infancy, and fewer facial or verbal expressions of concern for others’ distress, low positive affect, and eye contact deficits from age 2 onwards.
Inherited fearlessness sets the foundation for a failure to develop behavioral inhibition to threat, including non-social threat and social threat, which lead to high approach, reward dominance, and difficulty learning from punishment.
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