IMPORTANCE Variation in child responses to adversity creates a clinical challenge to identify children most resilient or susceptible to later risk for disturbances in cognition and health. Advances in establishing scalable biomarkers can lead to early identification and mechanistic understanding of the association of early adversity with neurodevelopment. OBJECTIVES To examine whether maternal reports of stress are associated with patterns in resting electroencephalography at 2 months of age and whether unique electroencephalographic profiles associated with risk and resiliency factors can be identified. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS For this cohort study, a population-based sample of 113 mother-infant dyads was recruited from January 1, 2016, to March 1, 2018, during regularly scheduled pediatric visits before infants were 2 months of age from 2 primary care clinics in Boston, Massachusetts, and Los Angeles, California, that predominantly serve families from low-income backgrounds. Data are reported from a single time point, when infants were aged 2 months, of an ongoing cohort study longitudinally following the mother-infant dyads. EXPOSURES Maternal reported exposure to stressful life events and perceived stress. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES Spectral power (absolute and relative) in different frequency bands (Δ, θ, low and high α, β, and γ) from infant resting electroencephalography (EEG) and EEG profiles across frequency bands determined by latent profile analysis. RESULTS Of 113 enrolled infants, 70 (mean [SD] age, 2.42 [0.37] months; 35 girls [50%]) provided usable EEG data. In multivariable hierarchical linear regressions, maternal perceived stress was significantly and negatively associated with absolute β (β = −0.
Neglect is a common and frequently chronic form of child maltreatment that can compromise child development and increase the risk of physical and psychological problems. In this review, we discuss one of the potential ways neglect becomes biologically embedded by shaping the development of a key stress responsive system: namely, the hypothalamic‐pituitary‐adrenal (HPA) axis. Several potential mediators and moderators of this process are examined, including inflammation, attachment and social buffering, self‐regulation, child sex and age, and genetics.
Highlights Access to infants’ multivariate neural representations has remained limited. Visual stimuli decoded from 12−15-month-olds’ EEG data, within 500 ms of onset. Infant multivariate representations didn’t linearly separate animal and body images. Proof-of-concept for time-resolved multivariate pattern analysis of infant EEG.
Associations have been observed between socioeconomic status (SES) and language outcomes from early childhood, but individual variability is high. Exposure to high levels of stress, often associated with low-SES status, might influence how parents and infants interact within the early language environment. Differences in these early language behaviors, and in early neurodevelopment, might underlie SES-based differences in language that emerge later on. Analysis of natural language samples from a predominantly low-/mid-income sample of mother-infant dyads, obtained using the Language Environment Analysis (LENA) system, found that maternal reports of exposure to stressful life events, and perceived stress, were negatively correlated with child vocalizations and conversational turns when infants were 6 and 12 months of age. Greater numbers of vocalizations and conversational turns were also associated with lower relative theta power and higher relative gamma power in 6- and 12-month baseline EEG – a pattern that might support subsequent language development.
The influence of socioeconomic variability on language and cognitive development is present from toddlerhood to adolescence and calls for investigating its earliest manifestation. Response to joint attention (RJA) abilities constitute a foundational developmental milestone that are associated with future language, cognitive, and social skills. How aspects of the family home environment shape RJA skills is relatively unknown. We investigated associations between family socioeconomic status (SES) —both parent education and family percentage of the federal poverty level (FPL)— parent depressive and anxiety symptoms and infant RJA performance in a cross‐sectional sample of 173 infants aged 8–18 months and their parents from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. Results suggest that, correcting for age and receptive language, infants in families with greater economic resources respond to relatively less redundant, more sophisticated cues for joint attention. Although parent depressive and anxiety symptoms are negatively correlated with SES, parent depressive and anxiety symptoms were not associated with infant RJA. These findings provide evidence of SES‐related differences in social cognitive development as early as infancy, calling on policymakers to address the inequities in the current socioeconomic landscape of the United States.
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