Developmental Social Neuroscience Research Articles

It takes a village: A multi-brain approach to studying multigenerational family communication

Grandparents play a critical role in child rearing across the globe. Yet, there is a shortage of neurobiological research examining the relationship between grandparents and their grandchildren. We employ multi-brain neurocomputational models to simulate how changes in neurophysiological processes in both development and healthy aging affect multigenerational inter-brain coupling – a neural marker that has been linked to a range of socio-emotional and cognitive outcomes. The simulations suggest that grandparent-child interactions may be paired with higher inter-brain coupling than parent-child interactions, raising the possibility that the former may be more advantageous under certain conditions. Critically, this enhancement of inter-brain coupling for grandparent-child interactions is more pronounced in tri-generational interactions that also include a parent, which may speak to findings that grandparent involvement in childrearing is most beneficial if the parent is also an active household member. Together, these findings underscore that a better understanding of the neurobiological basis of cross-generational interactions is vital, and that such knowledge can be helpful in guiding interventions that consider the whole family. We advocate for a community neuroscience approach in developmental social neuroscience to capture the diversity of child-caregiver relationships in real-world settings.

A Developmental Social Neuroscience Perspective on Infant Autism Interventions

Research on early biomarkers and behavioral precursors of autism has led to interventions initiated during the infant period that could potentially change the course of infant brain and behavioral development in autism. This article integrates neuroscience and clinical perspectives to explore how knowledge of infant brain and behavioral development can inform the design of infant autism interventions. Focusing on infants ≤12 months, we review studies on behavioral precursors of autism and their neural correlates and clinical trials evaluating the efficacy of infant autism interventions. We then consider how contemporary developmental social neuroscience theories of autism can shed light on the therapeutic strategies used in infant autism interventions and offer a new perspective that emphasizes improving child outcome and well-being by enhancing infant–environment fit. Finally, we offer recommendations for future research that incorporates brain-based measures to inform individualized approaches to intervention and discuss ethical issues raised by infant autism interventions. Readers are referred to Supplemental Table 1 for a glossary of terms used in this article.

Developmental Delays in Socio-Emotional Brain Functions in Persons with an Intellectual Disability: Impact on Treatment and Support.

Intellectual disability is a neurodevelopmental disorder with a related co-occurrence of mental health issues and challenging behaviors. In addition to purely cognitive functions, socio-emotional competencies may also be affected. In this paper, the lens of developmental social neuroscience is used to better understand the origins of mental disorders and challenging behaviors in people with an intellectual disability. The current concept of intelligence is broadened by socio-emotional brain functions. The emergence of these socio-emotional brain functions is linked to the formation of the respective neuronal networks located within the different parts of the limbic system. Thus, high order networks build on circuits that process more basic information. The socio-emotional skills can be assessed and complement the results of a standardized IQ-test. Disturbances of the brain cytoarchitecture and function that occur at a certain developmental period may increase the susceptibility to certain mental disorders. Insights into the current mental and socio-emotional functioning of a person may support clinicians in the calibration of treatment and support. Acknowledging the trajectories of the socio-emotional brain development may result in a more comprehensive understanding of behaviors and mental health in people with developmental delays and thus underpin supports for promotion of good mental health in this highly vulnerable population.

Mothers' Attachment Representations and Children's Brain Structure.

Ample research demonstrates that parents’ experience-based mental representations of attachment—cognitive models of close relationships—relate to their children’s social-emotional development. However, no research to date has examined how parents’ attachment representations relate to another crucial domain of children’s development: brain development. The present study is the first to integrate the separate literatures on attachment and developmental social cognitive neuroscience to examine the link between mothers’ attachment representations and 3- to 8-year-old children’s brain structure. We hypothesized that mothers’ attachment representations would relate to individual differences in children’s brain structures involved in stress regulation—specifically, amygdala and hippocampal volumes—in part via mothers’ responses to children’s distress. We assessed 52 mothers’ attachment representations (secure base script knowledge on the Attachment Script Assessment and self-reported attachment avoidance and anxiety on the Experiences in Close Relationships scale) and children’s brain structure. Mothers’ secure base script knowledge was significantly related to children’s smaller left amygdala volume but was unrelated to hippocampal volume; we found no indirect links via maternal responses to children’s distress. Exploratory analyses showed associations between mothers’ attachment representations and white matter and thalamus volumes. Together, these preliminary results suggest that mothers’ attachment representations may be linked to the development of children’s neural circuitry related to stress regulation.

Déficits précoces de l’empathie et psychopathologie

Empathy is a complex social-cognitive ability that is best understood by distinguishing its emotional, cognitive and motivational dimensions, which from early childhood interact between the child and her/his social environment. To date, among the many factors that are acknowledged to influence the development of empathy, children's temperament and parenting behaviors have been identified as interacting in predicting the extent to which children demonstrate empathic responses. Recent studies in developmental social neuroscience cast light on the neural networks engaged in the development of each of the dimensions that constitute empathy, which are needed to navigate social interaction and establishing positive social relationships. Indeed, early deficits in empathic processes can lead to difficulties in socialization, particularly associated with reduced attention to others’ emotions, especially when they are suffering, a lesser degree of remorse and guilt, and a greater tendency to ignore social norms or break the rules. Difficulties in socialization are particularly visible in two well-known developmental disorders: children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and children with conduct disorder and callous unemotional traits (CU). This paper provides a critical and selective review of recent empirical studies in psychopathology and developmental neuroscience by addressing the dimensions underlying empathy, specifically emotional sharing and caring for others. For children with ASD, some studies report that they pay less attention to another person in distress. However, functional neuroimaging studies conducted with ASD adolescents indicate that the emotional dimension appears to be preserved, but a lack of emotional self-regulation may impair them from experiencing empathic concern. Children with conduct disorder and CU traits clearly manifest a reduced autonomic nervous system response to others’ distress or suffering. This may account for their disregard or contempt for others’ well-being and social norms. Functional neuroimaging studies show that atypical patterns of brain activity at 15 months of age can predict later severe conduct disorder. Neural regions engaged in emotional processing such as the anterior cingulate cortex, insula and amygdala shown reduced activation to empathy-eliciting stimuli in children with CU. Finally, the genetic nature of CU traits is highlighted in several studies. We conclude by proposing several avenues for developmental research to identify biomarkers from an early age and by inviting to focus on psychological interventions with those populations accordingly.

The neurodevelopment of social preferences in early childhood.

Human social preferences are the product of gene-culture coevolution, and rely on predispositions that emerge early in development. These social preferences encompasse distinct motivations, mechanisms, and behaviors, that facilitate social cohesion and cooperation. Developmental social neuroscience critically contributes in elucidating the proximate mechanisms involved in social decision-making and prosociality, and their gradual maturation in interaction with the social and cultural environment.

An interactionist perspective on the development of coordinated social attention.

Infants' ability to coordinate their attention with other people develops profoundly across the first year of life. Mainly based on experimental research focusing on infants' behavior under highly controlled conditions, developmental milestones were identified and explained in the past by prominent theories in terms of the onset of specific cognitive skills. In contrast to this approach, recent longitudinal research challenges this perspective with findings suggesting that social attention develops continuously with a gradual refinement of skills. Informed by these findings, we argue for an interactionist and dynamical systems view that bases observable advances in infant social attention skills on increasingly fine-tuned mutual adjustments in the caregiver-infant dyad, resulting in gradually improving mutual prediction. We present evidence for this view from recent studies leveraging new technologies which afford the opportunity to dynamically track social interactions in real-time. These new technically-sophisticated studies offer unprecedented insights into the dynamic processes of infant-caregiver social attention. It is now possible to track in much greater detail fluctuations over time with regard to object-directed attention as well as social attention and how these processes relate to one another. Encouraged by these initial results and new insights from this interactionist developmental social neuroscience approach, we conclude with a "call to action" in which we advocate for more ecologically valid paradigms for studying social attention as a dynamic and bi-directional process.

Commentary: An updated agenda for the study of digital media use and adolescent development - future directions following Odgers & Jensen (2020).

Odgers and Jensen's (Annual research review: Adolescent mental health in the digital age: Facts, fears, and future directions, Wiley-Blackwell, 2020) review compellingly suggests that a rapid increase in the number of hours adolescents now dedicate to digital media use over the past decade may not be associated with concomitant changes in the prevalence of adolescent mental health disorders. Yet, there are many unexplored questions that deserve attention to fully understand how adolescents' use of digital media has transformed social experiences and adolescent development. In this commentary, we offer an agenda for researchers interested in examining digital media use within a broader developmental psychopathology framework. Specifically, we discuss past theories and emerging findings suggesting both deleterious and beneficial effects of digital media use, a need for greater semantic clarity in the field, and a call for greater methodological precision to fully capture concurrent and prospective associations between digital media use and adjustment. In addition, we suggest that it may be fruitful to dedicate less research attention toward the number of hours that adolescents spend using technology, and more on what specific behaviors teens engage in online. Moreover, more work is needed to understand individual vulnerability or resiliency factors that may impact online experiences. We review opportunities for future work on digital media use that may integrate findings from developmental social neuroscience and also discuss a need to investigate how adolescents' online behavior may be affecting developmental competencies offline. Adolescents' use of digital media is rapidly changing, and this is an important, yet challenging topic that deserves attention from investigators who study adolescent adjustment.

Moving developmental social neuroscience toward a second-person approach.

Infants’ cognitive development and learning rely profoundly on their interactions with other people. In the first year, infants become increasingly sensitive to others’ gaze and use it to focus their own attention on relevant visual input. However, infants are not passive observers in early social interactions, and these exchanges are characterized by high levels of contingency and reciprocity. Wass and colleagues offer first insights into the neurobehavioral dynamics of caregiver–infant interactions, demonstrating that caregivers’ scalp-recorded theta band activity responds to their infant’s changes in attention, and parental brain activation is associated with infants’ sustenance of attention. This research opens up entirely new ways of exploring caregiver–infant interactions and to understand early social attention as a reciprocal and dynamic process.

A Developmental Social Neuroscience Model for Understanding Pathways to Substance Use Disorders During Adolescence

Adolescence is a transitional period of development characterized by critical changes in physical, neural, cognitive, affective, and social functions. Studies investigating the underlying mechanisms of substance use at levels of self-report, brain response, and behavioral data are generally consistent with suggestions from dual-process model that differential growth rates of frontally mediated control and striato-frontal reward processing are related to a heightened risk of substance use during adolescence. However, social theories highlight the important role of social context and environment in which adolescents grow up and suggest that growing up in an unfavorable environment and in particular exposure to adverse childhood experiences play a huge role in how this vulnerability is translated into actual risk. In this review, we provide a summary of recent theories that examine a number of key individual and social and environmental risk factors underlying risk for early initiation and escalation of substance misuse. We also present a model that expands the dual-process model to incorporate the role of negative self-concept and negative affect associated with growing up in an unfavorable environment and their interactions with cognitive control and inhibition to further explain vulnerability to early initiation and development of substance misuse in adolescents.

Social Influence on Positive Youth Development: A Developmental Neuroscience Perspective.

Susceptibility to social influence is associated with a host of negative outcomes during adolescence. However, emerging evidence implicates the role of peers and parents in adolescents' positive and adaptive adjustment. Hence, in this chapter we highlight social influence as an opportunity for promoting social adjustment, which can redirect negative trajectories and help adolescents thrive. We discuss influential models about the processes underlying social influence, with a particular emphasis on internalizing social norms, embedded in social learning and social identity theory. We link this behavioral work to developmental social neuroscience research, rooted in neurobiological models of decision making and social cognition. Work from this perspective suggests that the adolescent brain is highly malleable and particularly oriented toward the social world, which may account for heightened susceptibility to social influences during this developmental period. This chapter underscores the need to leverage social influences during adolescence, even beyond the family and peer context, to promote positive developmental outcomes. By further probing the underlying neural mechanisms as an additional layer to examining social influence on positive youth development, we will be able to gain traction on our understanding of this complex phenomenon.

Precursors to morality in development as a complex interplay between neural, socioenvironmental, and behavioral facets

The nature and underpinnings of infants' seemingly complex, third-party, social evaluations remain highly contentious. Theoretical perspectives oscillate between rich and lean interpretations of the same expressed preferences. Although some argue that infants and toddlers possess a "moral sense" based on core knowledge of the social world, others suggest that social evaluations are hierarchical in nature and the product of an integration of rudimentary general processes such as attention allocation and approach and avoidance. Moreover, these biologically prepared minds interact in social environments that include significant variation, which are likely to impact early social evaluations and behavior. The present study examined the neural underpinnings of and precursors to moral sensitivity in infants and toddlers (n = 73, ages 12-24 mo) through a series of interwoven measures, combining multiple levels of analysis including electrophysiological, eye-tracking, behavioral, and socioenvironmental. Continuous EEG and time-locked event-related potentials (ERPs) and gaze fixation were recorded while children watched characters engaging in prosocial and antisocial actions in two different tasks. All children demonstrated a neural differentiation in both spectral EEG power density modulations and time-locked ERPs when perceiving prosocial or antisocial agents. Time-locked neural differences predicted children's preference for prosocial characters and were influenced by parental values regarding justice and fairness. Overall, this investigation casts light on the fundamental nature of moral cognition, including its underpinnings in general processes such as attention and approach-withdrawal, providing plausible mechanisms of early change and a foundation for forward movement in the field of developmental social neuroscience.

Commentary: Becoming social--a commentary on Happé & Frith (2014).

The field of developmental cognitive neuroscience is now established as a discipline at the nexus of the broader fields of developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Sitting in its rear view mirror, but gaining rapidly, is the nascent discipline of developmental social neuroscience. Given the relative youth of this field, it is not surprising that a great deal of energy has gone into generating a rich corpus of empirical data.

The Potential Benefits of Mindfulness Training in Early Childhood: A Developmental Social Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective

AbstractEarly childhood is marked by substantial development in the self‐regulatory skills supporting school readiness and socioemotional competence. Evidence from developmental social cognitive neuroscience suggests that these skills develop as a function of changes in a dynamic interaction between more top‐down (controlled) regulatory processes and more bottom‐up (automatic) influences on behavior. Mindfulness training—using age‐appropriate activities to exercise children's reflection on their moment‐to‐moment experiences—may support the development of self‐regulation by targeting top‐down processes while lessening bottom‐up influences (such as anxiety, stress, curiosity) to create conditions conducive to reflection, both during problem solving and in more playful, exploratory ways.

When during development do our brains get tuned to the human voice?

In the previous issue of Social Neuroscience, Lloyd-Fox and colleagues (2012) provide evidence that voice-sensitivity in temporal cortex emerges between 4 and 7 months of age. We discuss the implications of these findings and the overall progress that has been made in understanding the development of voice processing in infancy. In this commentary, we also examine important methodological and theoretical issues raised by this new work in the emerging field of developmental social neuroscience.

Developmental social neuroscience: An introduction

This Special Issue showcases some of the latest and best research in an important emerging field, developmental social neuroscience, which is focused on the nature and development of the many mecha...

A Cohesive Developmental Social Neuroscience: Research, Methods, and Integration

A Cohesive Developmental Social Neuroscience: Research, Methods, and Integration

Introduction to a Special Section of Developmental Social Cognitive Neuroscience

The articles in this special section offer a sample of the state of the art in an exploding new field. Noninvasive neuroimaging techniques, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalograms (EEG), and functional nearinfrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), are increasingly being used to study development in infants, children, adolescents, and adults. Applying these tools to the study of social cognitive development, in particular, is a very new development. Consequently, in this commentary, we wish to step back and consider the new intersection of neuroscience and social cognitive development. What do these new fields have to offer each other, theoretically and pragmatically? What pitfalls can we expect to encounter along the way? Even in adults, a neuroscience of social cognition is a new invention. Traditional neuroscientific techniques were applied to the brains of nonhuman animals, to study how brains see, hear, feel, move, and remember. Uniquely human cognitive capacities, such as language and social cognition, could not be studied in nonhuman animals. When neuroimaging techniques were first applied to human adults, the key test of these technologies was replication, in humans, of functions known from nonhuman animals. Thus, early neuroimaging focused on the human homologues of known regions from other primates: early visual cortex, the motion perception region (MT), early sensory, and motor cortices. Soon, though, human neuroimaging led to fascinating novel discoveries. The human brain contains many cortical regions, previously unknown or little studied, which have apparently social functions. The fusiform face area (FFA) is involved in perceiving human faces (Kanwisher, McDermott, & Chun, 1997). The extrastriate body area is involved in perceiving human bodies (Downing, Jiang, Shuman, & Kanwisher, 2001). The right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) is involved in perceiving and analyzing human actions (Pelphrey, Viola, & McCarthy, 2004). The right temporo–parietal junction (RTPJ) is involved in reasoning about people’s thoughts (Saxe & Kanwisher, 2003). The medial precuneus and posterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortices are involved in other aspects of higher level social cognition (Amodio & Frith, 2006). With the exception of the pSTS (Perrett et al., 1985), these regions were unknown from the studies of nonhuman animals. The discovery of these regions provides an exciting challenge for neuroscientists, and a role for developmental psychology. For neuroscientists, the key questions are: How are high-level social functions implemented in neurons? How do brain regions with these functional roles arise, phylogenetically and ontogenetically? Ideas, experimental paradigms, and data from developmental psychology may help to pose and to address these questions. For example, neuroimaging studies of action representation in the pSTS have been modeled on studies of infants’ action perception (Vander Wyk, Hudac, Carter, Sobel, & Pelphrey, in press); and most early studies of the RTPJ’s role in thinking about thoughts used versions of the false belief paradigm originally developed for studying children (e.g., Fletcher et al., 1995; Gallagher et al., 2000). In the future, we expect that neuroscientists will continue to benefit greatly from the theoretical concepts and paradigms generated within developmental psychology. We express our deepest gratitude to the outstanding reviewers who generously gave of their time in order to help us select the articles for this special section. Kevin Pelphrey and Rebecca Saxe are each supported by awards from the John Merck Scholars Fund and grants from the Simons Foundation. Additionally, a Career Development Award from the National Institute of Mental Health supports Kevin Pelphrey. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Rebecca Saxe, Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, MIT 46-4019, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139 or to Kevin Pelphrey, Child Study Center, Yale University, 230 South Frontage Rd., New Haven, CT 06520. Electronic mail may be sent to saxe@mit.edu or to kevin.pelphrey@yale.edu. Child Development, July/August 2009, Volume 80, Number 4, Pages 946–951

Developmental Social Cognitive Neuroscience: Insights From Deafness

The condition of deafness presents a developmental context that provides insight into the biological, cultural, and linguistic factors underlying the development of neural systems that impact social cognition. Studies of visual attention, behavioral regulation, language development, and face and human action perception are discussed. Visually based culture and language provides deaf children with affordances that promote resiliency and optimization in their development of visual engagement, executive functions, and theory of mind. These experiences promote neural adaptations permitting nuanced perception of classes of linguistic and emotional-social behaviors. Studies of deafness provide examples of how interactions and contributions of biological predispositions and genetic phenotypes with environmental and cultural factors including childhood experiences and actions of caregivers shape developmental trajectories.

Social neuroscience of child and adolescent depression

The social neuroscience of child and adolescent depression is inherently multidisciplinary. Depressive disorders beginning early in life can have serious developmental and functional consequences. Psychopathology research has described depression’s defining clinical and contextual features, and intervention research has characterized its response to treatment and prevention programs. Neuroendocrine, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging studies have identified core neurobiological aspects of early-onset mood disorders. These areas are reviewed using a developmental social neuroscience perspective for integrating disparate observations. The paper introduces a dynamic adaptive systems framework, and it discusses hedonic capacity, stress sensitivity, ruminative self-focus, and attentional impairments as fundamental components of mood disorders.