Hae

Sensitivity to others' emotional signals is an important factor for social interaction. While many studies of emotional reactivity focus on facial emotional expressions, signals such as pupil dilation which can indicate ...

The gut microbiota has been suggested to influence neurodevelopment in rodents. Preliminary human studies have associated fecal microbiota composition with features of emotional and cognitive development as well as differences in thalamus-amygdala connectivity. Currently, microbiota-gut-brain axis studies cover heterogenous set of infant and child brain developmental phenotypes, while microbiota associations with more fine-grained aspects of brain development remain largely unknown. Here (N = 122, 53% boys), we investigated the associations between infant fecal microbiota composition and infant attention to emotional faces, as bias for faces is strong in infancy and deviations in early processing of emotional facial expressions may influence the trajectories of social-emotional development. The fecal microbiota composition was assessed at 2.5 months of age and analyzed with 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Attention to emotional faces was assessed with an age-appropriate face-distractor paradigm, using neutral, happy, fearful, and scrambled faces and salient distractors, at 8 months of age. We observed an association between a lower abundance of Bifidobacterium and a higher abundance of Clostridium with an increased “fear bias,” that is, attention toward fearful versus happy/neutral faces. This data suggests an association between early microbiota and later fear bias, a well-established infant phenotype of emotionally directed attention. However, the clinical significance or causality of our findings remains to be assessed....

<p>TPH2, the rate-limiting enzyme in the synthesis of serotonin, has been connected to several psychiatric outcomes. Its allelic variant, rs4570625, has been found to relate to individual differences in cognitive and emotion ...

Self-regulation and language are intertwined abilities, but the nature of their relations in early childhood when both skills are still emerging is insufficiently understood. Our knowledge of the relations between early ...

<p>Emerging evidence suggests that exposure to unpredictable patterns of maternal sensory signals during infancy is associated with child neurodevelopment, including poorer effortful control. However, longitudinal effects ...

We evaluated associations between dental anxiety and four temperament dimensions: effortful control, extraversion/surgency, negative affect and orienting sensitivity among 2558 parents in the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study. ...