3-014 - The Influence of Parent-Child Interaction on Child Development: a Multi-Modal Social Neuroscience Approach

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Humans are social beings. Social interactions play a central role for the human species throughout the entire life span, but especially in early life when children are dependent on support and protection by others (Insel & Young, 2001; Bowlby, 1969). The social environment is not only vitally salient for humans due to the simple evolutionary constraint of social dependency for survival, however, but also because social interactions provide key wiring instructions that determine brain development (Atzil et. al., 2018). The above being said, current social neuroscience frameworks remain poorly equipped to explain how social interactions influence child development on a neurobiological and -physiological level.
In the present symposium, three papers will show new empirical evidence on how parent-child interactions affect (i) social threat processing in children during caregiver handholding, (ii) social learning as a function of parent-infant neural dynamics measured with electroencephalography (EEG), as well as (iii) bio-behavioral synchrony during a collaboration task in parent-child dyads measured with dual functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). In so doing, a special focus will be directed to parent-child relationship quality as a function of both behavior and personality/inter-individual differences. Subsequently, a fourth paper will draw connections between the previously presented findings and put them into a larger theoretical perspective derived from a new field of research named the social neuroscience of human attachment (Vrtička & Vuilleumier, 2012; Vrtička, 2017). Altogether, a multi-modal social neuroscience approach to assess the influence of parent-child interaction on child development guiding future research and theory development will emerge.

Sub Unit

• Biological Processes: Neuroscience and Genetics

Chairs

• Pascal Vrticka, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences

• Stefanie Hoehl, University of Vienna

Individual Presentations

• Caregiver Handholding Decreases Social Threat Bias in Preschoolers - Presenting Author: Cat Thrasher, University of Virginia; Non-Presenting Author: Tobias Grossmann, University of Virginia

• Parent-Infant Neural Dynamics During Social Learning - Presenting Author: Victoria Leong, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Cambridge University, UK; Non-Presenting Author: Valdas Noreika, Cambridge University; Non-Presenting Author: Lorena Santamaria, Cambridge University; Non-Presenting Author: Kaili Clackson, Cambridge University; Non-Presenting Author: Stanimira Georgieva, Cambridge University; Non-Presenting Author: Sam Wass, University of Cambridge

• Neural Synchrony in Caregiver-Child Interactions: The Role of Attachment and Sensitivity - Presenting Author: Trinh Nguyen, University of Vienna; Non-Presenting Author: Ezgi Kayhan, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig; Non-Presenting Author: Hanna Schleihauf, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig; Non-Presenting Author: Daniel Matthes, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig; Non-Presenting Author: Pascal Vrticka, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences; Non-Presenting Author: Stefanie Hoehl, University of Vienna

• Towards a Social Neuroscience of Parent-Child Interaction: An Attachment Perspective - Presenting Author: Pascal Vrticka, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences; Non-Presenting Author: Willem J. M. I. Verbeke, Department of Business Economics, Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam; Non-Presenting Author: Tsachi Ein-Dor, a School of Psychology, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya