Early adverse experiences are well understood to affect development and well-being, placing individuals at risk for negative physical and mental health outcomes. A growing literature documents the effects of adversity on developing neurobiological systems. Fewer studies have examined stress neurobiology to understand how to mitigate the effects of early adversity. This review summarizes the research on three neurobiological systems relevant to interventions for populations experiencing high levels of early adversity: the hypothalamic-adrenal-pituitary axis, the prefrontal cortex regions involved in executive functioning, and the system involved in threat detection and response, particularly the amygdala. Also discussed is the emerging field of epigenetics and related interventions to mitigate early adversity. Further emphasized is the need for intervention research to integrate knowledge about the neurobiological effects of prenatal stressors (e.g., drug use, alcohol exposure) and early adversity. The review concludes with a discussion of the implications of this research topic for clinical psychology practice and public policy.

In this article, we focus on applying methods of translational neuroscience to two-generation, family-based interventions. In recent years, a small but growing body of evidence has documented the reversibility of some of the neurobiological effects of early adversity in the context of environmental early interventions. Some of these interventions are now being implemented at scale, which may help reduce disparities in the face of early life stress. Further progress may occur by extending these efforts to two-generation models that target caregivers’ capabilities to improve children’s outcomes. In this article, we describe the content and processes of the Filming Interactions to Nurture Development (FIND) video coaching intervention. We also discuss the two-generation, translational neuroscience framework on which FIND is based, and how similar approaches can be developed and scaled to mitigate the effects of adversity.

Infant faces are highly salient social stimuli that appear to elicit intuitive parenting behaviors in healthy adult women. Behavioral and observational studies indicate that this effect may be modulated by experiences of reproduction, caregiving, and psychiatric symptomatology that affect normative attention and reward processing of infant cues. However, relatively little is known about the neural correlates of these effects. Using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, this study investigated the impact of parental status (mother, non-mother) and depression symptoms on early visual processing of infant faces in a community sample of adult women. Specifically, the P1 and N170 ERP components elicited in response to infant face stimuli were examined. While characteristics of the N170 were not modulated by parental status, a statistically significant positive correlation was observed between depression symptom severity and N170 amplitude. This relationship was not observed for the P1. These results suggest that depression symptoms may modulate early neurophysiological responsiveness to infant cues, even at sub-clinical levels.

As the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders has become increasingly medicalized (Conrad & Slodden, 2013), consideration for the relational nature of trauma has been minimized in the healing process. As psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1971) outlined in his essays, the medical model is an approach to pathology that seeks to find medical treatments for symptoms and syndromes based on categorized diagnoses. We argue that such a model implicitly locates the pathology of trauma within the individual instead of within the person(s) who perpetrated the harm or the social and societal contexts in which it took place. In this article, we argue that this framework is pathologizing insofar as it both prioritizes symptom reduction as the goal of treatment and minimizes the significance of relational harm. After providing a brief overview of betrayal trauma (Freyd, 1996) and the importance of relational processes in healing, we describe standard treatments for betrayal trauma that are grounded in the medical model. In discussing the limitations of this framework, we offer an alternative to the medicalization of trauma-related distress: relational cultural therapy (e.g., Miller& Stiver, 1997). Within this nonpathologizing framework, we highlight the importance of attending to contextual, societal, and cultural influences of trauma as well as how these influences might impact the therapeutic relationship. We then detail extratherapeutic options as additional nonpathologizing avenues for healing, as freedom to choose among a variety of options may be particularly liberating for people who have experienced trauma. Finally, we discuss the complex process of truly healing from betrayal trauma.

Although poor parenting is known to be closely linked to self-regulation difficulties in early childhood, comparatively little is understood about the role of other risk factors in the early caregiving environment (such as a parent’s own experiences of childhood abuse) in developmental pathways of self-regulation into adolescence. Using a longitudinal design, this study aimed to examine how a mother’s history of abuse in childhood relates to her offspring’s self-regulation difficulties in preadolescence. Maternal controlling parenting and exposure to intimate partner aggression in the child’s first 24–36 months were examined as important early social and environmental influences that may explain the proposed connection between maternal abuse history and preadolescent self-regulation. An ethnically diverse sample of mothers (N = 488) who were identified as at-risk for child maltreatment was recruited at the time of their children’s birth. Mothers and their children were assessed annually from the child’s birth through 36 months, and at age 9–11 years. Structural equation modeling and bootstrap tests of indirect effects were conducted to address the study aims. Findings indicated that maternal abuse history indirectly predicted their children’s self-regulation difficulties in preadolescence mainly through maternal controlling parenting in early childhood, but not through maternal exposure to aggression by an intimate partner. Maternal history of childhood abuse and maternal controlling parenting in her child’s early life may have long-term developmental implications for child self-regulation.

In this study, we utilized a novel fMRI paradigm to examine the behavioral and neural correlates of parenting self-evaluation in a sample of mothers with at least one child under the age of 4 (N = 37). Prior self-report, behavioral and observational research document the implications of parenting self-evaluations for parent well-being and caregiving behavior; however, relatively little is known about the neural circuitry underlying these self-referential processes and to what extent they are influenced by caregiving experience. Although neuroimaging paradigms indexing other aspects of parental function exist, this is the first to use functional neuroimaging to study parenting self-evaluation in a controlled laboratory setting. We found parenting self-evaluations elicited significantly greater activity across most cortical midline structures, including the medial prefrontal cortex compared to control evaluations; these findings converge with previous work on the neural underpinning of general trait self-evaluation. Notable differences by parity were observed in exploratory analyses: specifically, primiparous mothers endorsed a higher number of developmentally supportive traits, exhibited faster reaction times, and showed a greater difference in mPFC activity when making self-evaluations of developmentally supportive traits than of developmentally unsupportive traits, compared to multiparous mothers. Implications of these findings and study limitations are discussed.

Although interventions that promote child-supportive parenting for children have been shown to positively impact caregiving behaviors as well as child behavioral and neurobiological functioning, less is known about which aspects of maternal brain functioning are affected by such interventions. In the present study, we conducted a preliminary evaluation of the impact of the Filming Interactions to Nurture Development (FIND) video coaching program on mothers with at least one child age four or younger. We employed a waitlist control design with pre-post data. Compared to mothers in the control condition ( n = 16), mothers who received FIND ( n = 16) showed changes in neural measures of inhibitory control and behavioral measures of parenting self-evaluation during a series of functional neuroimaging tasks. Specifically, we found a group by time interaction in clusters in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and insula for the Correct Stop > Correct Go contrast of the stop signal task (SST), where FIND increased brain activity associated with inhibitory control compared to mothers in the control condition; and FIND increased mothers’ endorsement of child-supportive parenting traits in the parenting self-evaluation task (PSET). Exploratory moderators, study limitations, and the implications of these findings for strength-based parenting programs are discussed.

Despite burgeoning evidence linking early exposure to child maltreatment (CM) to deficits in self-regulation, the pathways to strong regulatory development in these children are not well understood, and significant heterogeneity is observed in their outcomes. Experiences of autonomy may play a key role in transmitting self-regulatory capacity across generations and help explain individual differences in maltreatment outcomes. In this study, we investigated multigenerational associations between Generation 1 (G1)–Generation 2 (G2) mothers’ early experience of warmth and autonomy in relation to their own mothers and their Generation 3 (G3) children’s autonomic physiological regulation in CM (n = 85) and non-CM (n = 128) families. We found that G2 mothers who recalled greater autonomy in their childhood relationship with their G1 mothers had preschool-age G3 children with higher respiratory sinus arrhythmia at baseline when alone while engaged in individual challenge tasks, during social exchanges with their mother in joint challenge tasks, and during the portions of the strange situation procedure when the mother was present. Although no clear mediators of this association emerged, multigenerational links among G1–G2 relations, maternal representations of her child, child behavior, and child respiratory sinus arrhythmia differed by maltreatment status, thus possibly representing important targets for future research and intervention.