Hae

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a safe method to examine human brain. However, a typical MR scan is very sensitive to motion, and it requires the subject to lie still during the acquisition, which is a major challenge ...

<p>Maternal postpartum depression is a prominent risk factor for aberrant child socioemotional development, but there is little understanding about the neural phenotypes that underlie infant sensitivity to maternal depression. ...

<p><i>Objective:</i> At the broadest level, self-regulation refers to a range of separate, but inter-related, processes (e.g., working memory, inhibition, emotion regulation) central for the regulation of cognition, emotion ...

<p>The association between child temperament characteristics and total diurnal saliva cortisol in 84 children (M = 2.3 years, SD = 0.6) attending out-of-home, center-based child care and 79 children (M = 2.0 years, SD = ...

<p>After 5 months of age, infants begin to prioritize attention to fearful over other facial expressions. One key proposition is that amygdala and related early-maturing subcortical network, is important for emergence of this attentional bias – however, empirical data to support these assertions are lacking. In this prospective longitudinal study, we measured amygdala volumes from MR images in 65 healthy neonates at 2–5 weeks of gestation corrected age and attention disengagement from fearful vs. non-fearful facial expressions at 8 months with eye tracking. Overall, infants were less likely to disengage from fearful than happy/neutral faces, demonstrating an age-typical bias for fear. Left, but not right, amygdala volume (corrected for intracranial volume) was positively associated with the likelihood of disengaging attention from fearful faces to a salient lateral distractor (r = .302, p = .014). No association was observed with the disengagement from neutral or happy faces in equivalent conditions (r = .166 and .125, p = .186 and .320, respectively). These results are the first to link the amygdala volume with the emerging perceptual vigilance for fearful faces during infancy. They suggest a link from the prenatally defined variability in the amygdala size to early postnatal emotional and social traits.<br /></p>...