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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 November 2017

Johanna Bick ,
Rhiannon Luyster ,
Nathan A. Fox ,
Charles H. Zeanah  and
Charles A. Nelson
Johanna Bick
Affiliation:
University of Houston
Rhiannon Luyster
Affiliation:
Emerson College
Nathan A. Fox
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
Charles H. Zeanah
Affiliation:
Tulane University
Charles A. Nelson*
Affiliation:
Boston Children's Hospital Harvard Medical School Harvard Graduate School of Education
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Charles A. Nelson III, Boston Children's Hospital/Harvard Medical School, 1 Autumn Street, Boston, MA 02115; E-mail: [email protected].
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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.

Type
Special Issue Articles
Information
Development and Psychopathology , Volume 29 , Special Issue 5: Biological and Behavioral Effects of Early Adversity on Multiple Levels of Development , December 2017 , pp. 1749 - 1761
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

Preparation of this manuscript was supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Binder Family Foundation, the Help the Children of Romania, Inc. Foundation, and NIMH Grant MH 091363 (to C.A.N.).

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