Effects of early institutionalization on emotion processing in 12-year-old youth

Abstract

We examined facial emotion recognition in 12-year-olds in a longitudinally followed sample of children with and without exposure to early life psychosocial deprivation (institutional care). Half of the institutionally reared children were randomized into foster care homes during the first years of life. Facial emotion recognition was examined in a behavioral task using morphed images. This same task had been administered when children were 8 years old. Neutral facial expressions were morphed with happy, sad, angry, and fearful emotional facial expressions, and children were asked to identify the emotion of each face, which varied in intensity. Consistent with our previous report, we show that some areas of emotion processing, involving the recognition of happy and fearful faces, are affected by early deprivation, whereas other areas, involving the recognition of sad and angry faces, appear to be unaffected. We also show that early intervention can have a lasting positive impact, normalizing developmental trajectories of processing negative emotions (fear) into the late childhood/preadolescent period.

Effects of Early Neglect Experience on Recognition and Processing of Facial Expressions: A Systematic Review

“…A recent follow-up investigation of this study showed that when these children reached 12 years of age there was a maintained deficit in the processing of facial expressions. Institutionally reared children required more perceptual information to accurately identify happy facial emotions, when compared to family-reared children [ 62 ]. Ardizzi and colleagues assessed 5- to 10-years-old children living on the streets of Sierra Leone (mean = 7.65 years ± 1.68), frequently exposed to a very abusive and neglectful environment.…”

Friendship and social functioning following early institutional rearing: The role of ADHD symptoms

“…Furthermore, PI children, on average, had greater difficulties learning from social cues. Despite the findings that emotional face processing may be a case of relative sparing following institutional rearing (Young, Luyster, Fox, Zeanah, & Nelson, 2017), and early institutional care is unrelated to emotional identification of angry faces (Bick, Luyster, Fox, Zeanah, & Nelson, 2017; Fries & Pollak, 2004), here, when angry faces were used as social cues for decision-making, we found differences in behavioral responses to incrementally increasing angry emotional facial cues. The ability to understand and use facial expressions of emotion to guide and adjust behavior is an important task for navigating social interactions.…”

How Early Experience Shapes Human Development: The Case of Psychosocial Deprivation

“…Children with a history of institutional rearing also have demonstrated significant psychiatric problems. These have ranged from autistic-like social abnormalities [75] to aggressive behaviors and callous unemotional traits [76, 77] to hyperactivity [78] to poor executive control [79–83] and perhaps most characteristic of children with a history of institutional care, inattention/overactivity [67]. Particularly intriguing was Rutter et al's [74] observation that nearly 10% of the previously institutionalized sample at age 4 demonstrated socially aberrant behavior they referred to as “quasi-autism.” Although at 4 years, the clinical picture of children so designated was indistinguishable from classic autism, by age 6 years their clinical picture had changed sufficiently that they were designated “quasi” autistic rather than displaying autism proper.…”

“…These domains included psychiatric symptoms and disorders [76, 105] and peer social competence [106, 107]. Finally, there were domains of functioning that were mostly unaffected by the intervention (including ADHD; [76, 105]; and most executive functions; [79, 80, 108]) and even a few domains that seemingly were unaffected by exposure to early adversity (face and emotion processing; [79, 96, 109–111]). The lack of critical periods for some domains is not surprising given the complexity and heterogeneity of the domains of functioning being assessed (e.g., psychopathology).…”