Growing up in a Social Context: Brain and Emotional Development From Infancy to Early Adolescence

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Emotional development occurs within numerous daily social interactions, starting from interactions with the caregivers and continuing later to other relationships. These interactions are necessary for developing a repertoire of emotional behaviors, and so researching them has vast long-term implications. This symposium presents new theoretical hypotheses and empirical evidence for the environment’s role in shaping affective reactions, focusing specifically on the neurobiological mechanisms that mediate these environmental influences in infancy, childhood, and early adolescence. The first talk presents a global theoretical framework for how social interactions provide ‘wiring instructions’ that affect the social brain, and how these effects manifest in socio-emotional behaviors. Focusing on the infancy period, the second talk presents neuroimaging evidence for the role of the medial Prefrontal Cortex in infants’ responses to other people’s emotions and impression formation, thus exemplifying the importance of ‘social brain areas’ for reactions to social interactions, already in infancy. Continuing to middle childhood and adolescence, the third talk demonstrates the role of major disruptions in caregiving relationships (i.e., maltreatment) in shaping the development of hippocampal-frontoamygdala circuitry and how youth learn about threat and safety in their environment. Finally, the fourth talk presents evidence that the co-development of personality and empathy in early adolescence is influenced, in part, by environmental factors specific to the adolescence period, and discusses possible neurophysiological mechanisms that may mediate these effects. Together, the four talks provide a novel way to understand how brain development mediate environmental influences on emotional processes.

Sub Unit

• Biological Processes: Neuroscience and Genetics

Chairs

• Lior Abramson, Columbia University

• Ariel Knafo-Noam, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Individual Presentations

• Growing a Social Brain - Presenting Author: Shir Atzil, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• Friend or Foe? Exploring Impression Formation in the Human Infant Brain - Presenting Author: Tobias Grossmann, University of Virginia - Charlottesville; Non-Presenting Author: Kathleen Krol, University of Virginia - Charlottesville

• Youth Exposed to Maltreatment Show Age-related Alterations in Hippocampal-Frontoamygdala Function During Extinction Recall - Presenting Author: Dylan Gee, Yale University; Non-Presenting Author: Natalie Colich, University Of Washington; Non-Presenting Author: Margaret A. Sheridan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Non-Presenting Author: Daniel S. Pine, National Institutes of Health; Non-Presenting Author: Katie McLaughlin, Harvard University

• The Empathic Personality Disposition: Disentangling Genetic and Environmental Influences on Personality-Empathy Relations During Adolescence - Presenting Author: Lior Abramson, Columbia University; Non-Presenting Author: Eran Eldar, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Non-Presenting Author: Noam Markovitch, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Non-Presenting Author: Ariel Knafo-Noam, Hebrew University of Jerusalem