Altered topological structure of the brain white matter in maltreated children through topological data analysis.

Childhood maltreatment may adversely affect brain development and consequently influence behavioral, emotional, and psychological patterns during adulthood. In this study, we propose an analytical pipeline for modeling the altered topological structure of brain white matter in maltreated and typically developing children. We perform topological data analysis (TDA) to assess the alteration in the global topology of the brain white matter structural covariance network among children. We use persistent homology, an algebraic technique in TDA, to analyze topological features in the brain covariance networks constructed from structural magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion tensor imaging. We develop a novel framework for statistical inference based on the Wasserstein distance to assess the significance of the observed topological differences. Using these methods in comparing maltreated children with a typically developing control group, we find that maltreatment may increase homogeneity in white matter structures and thus induce higher correlations in the structural covariance; this is reflected in the topological profile. Our findings strongly suggest that TDA can be a valuable framework to model altered topological structures of the brain. The MATLAB codes and processed data used in this study can be found at https://github.com/laplcebeltrami/maltreated.

We employ topological data analysis (TDA) to investigate altered topological structures in the white matter of children who have experienced maltreatment. Persistent homology in TDA is utilized to quantify topological differences between typically developing children and those subjected to maltreatment, using magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion tensor imaging data. The Wasserstein distance is computed between topological features to assess disparities in brain networks. Our findings demonstrate that persistent homology effectively characterizes the altered dynamics of white matter in children who have suffered maltreatment.

The structure and development of explore-exploit decision making.

A critical component of human learning reflects the balance people must achieve between focusing on the utility of what they know versus openness to what they have yet to experience. How individuals decide whether to explore new options versus exploit known options has garnered growing interest in recent years. Yet, the component processes underlying decisions to explore and whether these processes change across development remain poorly understood. By contrasting a variety of tasks that measure exploration in slightly different ways, we found that decisions about whether to explore reflect (a) random exploration that is not explicitly goal-directed and (b) directed exploration to purposefully reduce uncertainty. While these components similarly characterized the decision-making of both youth and adults, younger participants made decisions that were less strategic, but more exploratory and flexible, than those of adults. These findings are discussed in terms of how people adapt to and learn from changing environments over time.Data has been made available in the Open Science Foundation platform (osf.io).

Cortisol's diurnal rhythm indexes the neurobiological impact of child adversity in adolescence.

Adverse early life experiences, such as child maltreatment, shapes hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) activity. The impact of social context is often probed through laboratory stress reactivity, yet child maltreatment is a severe form of chronic stress that recalibrates even stable or relatively inflexible stress systems such as cortisol's diurnal rhythm. This study was designed to determine how different social contexts, which place divergent demands on children, shape cortisol's diurnal rhythm. Participants include 120 adolescents (9-14 years), including 42 youth with substantiated child physical abuse. Up to 32 saliva samples were obtained in the laboratory, on days youth stayed home, and on school days. A 3-level hierarchical linear model examined cortisol within each day and extracted the diurnal rhythm at level 1; across days at level 2; and between-individual differences in cortisol and its rhythm at level 3. While cortisol's diurnal rhythm was flattened when youth were in the novel laboratory context, the impact of maltreatment was observed within the home context such that maltreated children had persistently flattened diurnal rhythms. The effect of maltreatment overlapped with current chronic interpersonal family stress. Results are consistent with the idea that maltreatment exerts a robust, detrimental impact on the HPA axis and are interpreted in the context of less flexibility and rhythmicity. The HPA axis adapts by encoding signifiers of relevant harsh or unpredictable environments, and the extreme stress of physical abuse in the family setting may be one of these environments which calibrates the developing child's stress responsive system, even throughout a developmental stage in which the family takes on diminishing importance.

Category Flexibility in Emotion Learning.

Learners flexibly update category boundaries to adjust to the range of experiences they encounter. However, little is known about whether the degree of flexibility is consistent across domains. We examined whether categorization of social input, specifically emotions, is afforded more flexibility as compared to other biological input. To address this question, children (6-12 years; 32 female, 37 male; 7 Hispanic or Latino, 62 not Hispanic or Latino; 8 Black or African American, 14 multiracial, 46 White, 1 selected "other") categorized faces morphed from calm to upset and animals morphed from a horse to a cow across task phases that differed in the distribution of stimuli presented. Learners flexibly adjusted both emotion and animal category boundaries according to distributional information, yet children showed more flexibility when updating their category boundaries for emotions. These results provide support for the idea that children-who must adjust to the vast and varied emotional signals of their social partners-respond to social signals dynamically in order to make predictions about the internal states and future behaviors of others.

Childhood unpredictability and the development of exploration.

Early in development, the process of exploration helps children gather new information that fosters learning about the world. Yet, it is unclear how childhood experiences may influence the way humans approach new learning. What influences decisions to exploit known, familiar options versus trying a novel alternative? We found that childhood unpredictability, characterized by unpredictable caregiving and unstable living environments, was associated with reduced exploratory behavior. This effect holds while controlling for individual differences, including anxiety and stress. Individuals who perceived their childhoods as unpredictable explored less and were instead more likely to repeat previous choices (habitual responding). They were also more sensitive to uncertainty than to potential rewards, even when the familiar options yielded lower rewards. We examined these effects across multiple task contexts and via both in-person (N = 78) and online replication (N = 84) studies among 10- to 13-y-olds. Results are discussed in terms of the potential cascading effects of unpredictable environments on the development of decision-making and the effects of early experience on subsequent learning.

Altered Topological Structure of the Brain White Matter in Maltreated Children through Topological Data Analysis.

Childhood maltreatment may adversely affect brain development and consequently influence behavioral, emotional, and psychological patterns during adulthood. In this study, we propose an analytical pipeline for modeling the altered topological structure of brain white matter in maltreated and typically developing children. We perform topological data analysis (TDA) to assess the alteration in the global topology of the brain white-matter structural covariance network among children. We use persistent homology, an algebraic technique in TDA, to analyze topological features in the brain covariance networks constructed from structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). We develop a novel framework for statistical inference based on the Wasserstein distance to assess the significance of the observed topological differences. Using these methods in comparing maltreated children to a typically developing control group, we find that maltreatment may increase homogeneity in white matter structures and thus induce higher correlations in the structural covariance; this is reflected in the topological profile. Our findings strongly suggest that TDA can be a valuable framework to model altered topological structures of the brain. The MATLAB codes and processed data used in this study can be found at https://github.com/laplcebeltrami/maltreated.

The role of maternal trauma and discipline types in emotional processing among Syrian refugee children.

Stressful experiences in armed conflict incur intergenerational effects through parental behaviors with their children. A recent study reported that among Syrian refugee families, mothers' (but not fathers') post-traumatic stress (PTS) impacted children's emotional processing. In this study, we aim to shed further light on this phenomenon by analyzing how the parenting practices in the context of post-traumatic stress confers protection or risk for children's emotional processing. Participants were 6-18-year-old children (n = 212) and their mothers (n = 94), who fled from Syria and were residing in Turkish communities. We used the computer-based emotional processing task including photos of facial movements typically associated with different emotions to measure children's capacity for emotional processing. Mothers reported their PTS and the discipline types they use, as well as the contextual factors related to their refugee background. Linear mixed effect models were constructed first, to find out the discipline types that are most strongly associated with emotional processing of the child, and second, to examine whether these discipline types moderate the effect of maternal PTS on children's emotional processing. Finally, generalized linear models were constructed to examine which contextual factors are associated with the use of these discipline types by mothers. We found that spanking as a discipline type was associated with poorer child emotional processing, whereas withholding of media access was associated with better emotional processing. Younger and less religious mothers were more prone to use spanking. The study underlines the need for parenting programs alongside with efforts to address mental health issues among mothers living under armed conflict.

Perceptual learning is robust to manipulations of valence and arousal in childhood and adulthood.

Despite clear links between affective processes in many areas of cognition and perception, the influence of affective valence and arousal on low-level perceptual learning have remained largely unexplored. Such influences could have the potential to disrupt or enhance learning that would have long-term consequences for young learners. The current study manipulated 8- to 11-year-old children's and young adults' mood using video clips (to induce a positive mood) or a psychosocial stressor (to induce a negative mood). Each participant then completed one session of a low-level visual learning task (visual texture paradigm). Using novel computational methods, we did not observe evidence for the modulation of visual perceptual learning by manipulations of emotional arousal or valence in either children or adults. The majority of results supported a model of perceptual learning that is overwhelmingly constrained to the task itself and independent from external factors such as variations in learners' affect.

Acquiring Complex Communicative Systems: Statistical Learning of Language and Emotion.

During the early postnatal years, most infants rapidly learn to understand two naturally evolved communication systems: language and emotion. While these two domains include different types of content knowledge, it is possible that similar learning processes subserve their acquisition. In this review, we compare the learnable statistical regularities in language and emotion input. We then consider how domain-general learning abilities may underly the acquisition of language and emotion, and how this process may be constrained in each domain. This comparative developmental approach can advance our understanding of how humans learn to communicate with others.

Children's value-based decision making.

To effectively navigate their environments, infants and children learn how to recognize events predict salient outcomes, such as rewards or punishments. Relatively little is known about how children acquire this ability to attach value to the stimuli they encounter. Studies often examine children's ability to learn about rewards and threats using either classical conditioning or behavioral choice paradigms. Here, we assess both approaches and find that they yield different outcomes in terms of which individuals had efficiently learned the value of information presented to them. The findings offer new insights into understanding how to assess different facets of value learning in children.

Approach motivation and loneliness: Individual differences and parasympathetic activity.

Loneliness, or perceived social isolation, is linked to a number of negative long-term effects on both mental and physical health. However, how an individual responds to feeling lonely may influence their risk for later negative health outcomes. Here, we sought to clarify what influences variability in individuals' motivated responses to loneliness. Specifically, we assessed whether resting parasympathetic activity, a physiological marker linked to flexible adaptation, facilitates increased approach-oriented behaviors. Seventy-four adult participants underwent a conditioning paradigm assessing how they approach and avoid rewards and threats. Individuals with higher levels of loneliness and high resting parasympathetic activity were more likely to demonstrate approach behaviors. We discuss these findings in terms of the role resting parasympathetic activity may play in facilitating adaptive responses to feeling socially isolated.

Emotion regulation as mediator between childhood adversity and psychopathology: A meta-analysis.

Childhood adversity is a major risk factor for multiple forms of psychopathology, and recent efforts have focused on understanding the underlying psychological mechanisms. One outstanding candidate is emotion regulation, which has been associated with both childhood adversity, and psychopathology. Based on the available evidence, the present meta-analysis set out to investigate the mechanistic involvement of emotion regulation in the relation between childhood adversity and psychopathology. Systematic searches in three databases (PubMed; PsycINFO; Web of Science) identified 215 eligible studies. Using meta-analytic structural equation modeling, we fitted a partial mediation model to the available data across studies, in which childhood adversity was related to psychopathology both directly and through emotion regulation. Multiple emotion regulation dimensions were analyzed, including emotion regulation difficulties and the habitual use of rumination, distraction, reappraisal, and suppression. Measures of psychopathology included a wide range of internalizing and externalizing symptoms in both clinical and non-clinical samples. The results indicated that childhood adversity was positively associated with emotion regulation difficulties, as well as with the habitual use of rumination and suppression. In turn, these measures of emotion regulation were positively associated with psychopathology. Habitual reappraisal use showed negative relations with both childhood adversity and psychopathology. All these emotion regulation measures were supported as mediators in the relation between childhood adversity and psychopathology. In contrast, distraction was not related to childhood adversity or psychopathology, and its mediator role was not supported. These results suggest that altered emotion regulation is a consistent marker of childhood adversity and contributes to risk of psychopathology.

Low household income and neurodevelopment from infancy through adolescence.

Despite advancements in the study of brain maturation at different developmental epochs, no work has linked the significant neural changes occurring just after birth to the subtler refinements in the brain occurring in childhood and adolescence. We aimed to provide a comprehensive picture regarding foundational neurodevelopment and examine systematic differences by family income. Using a nationally representative longitudinal sample of 486 infants, children, and adolescents (age 5 months to 20 years) from the NIH MRI Study of Normal Brain Development and leveraging advances in statistical modeling, we mapped developmental trajectories for the four major cortical lobes and constructed charts that show the statistical distribution of gray matter and reveal the considerable variability in regional volumes and structural change, even among healthy, typically developing children. Further, the data reveal that significant structural differences in gray matter development for children living in or near poverty, first detected during childhood (age 2.5-6.5 years), evolve throughout adolescence.

Training reduces error in rating the intensity of emotions.

The ability to recognize how another is feeling is a critical skill, with profound implications for social adaptation. Training programs designed to improve social functioning typically attempt to direct attention toward or away from certain facial configurations, or to improve discrimination between emotions by categorizing faces. However, emotion recognition involves processes in addition to attentional orienting or categorical labeling. The intensity with which someone is experiencing an emotion is also influential; knowing whether someone is annoyed or enraged will guide an observer's response. Here, we systematically examined a novel paradigm designed to improve ratings of facial information communicating emotion intensity in a sample of 492 participants across a series of 8 studies. In Study 1, participants improved precision in recognizing the intensity of facial cues through personalized corrective feedback. These initial findings were replicated in a randomized-control trial comparing training with feedback to viewing and rating faces without feedback. Studies 2 and 3 revealed that these effects generalize to identities and facial configurations not included in the training. Study 4 indicated that the effects were sustained beyond the training session. These findings suggest that individualized, corrective feedback is effective for reducing error in rating the intensity of facial cues. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Early life stress and neural development: Implications for understanding the developmental effects of COVID-19.

Chronic and/or extreme stress in childhood, often referred to as early life stress, is associated with a wide range of long-term effects on development. Given this, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to concern about how stress due to the pandemic will affect children's development and mental health. Although early life stress has been linked to altered functioning of a number of neural and biological systems, there is a wide range of variability in children's outcomes. The mechanisms that influence these individual differences are still not well understood. In the past, studies of stress in childhood focused on the type of events that children encountered in their lives. We conducted a review of the literature to formulate a new perspective on the effects of early life stress on development. This new, topological model, may increase understanding of the potential effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on children's development. This model is oriented on children's perceptions of their environment and their social relationships, rather than specific events. These factors influence central and peripheral nervous system development, changing how children interpret, adapt, and respond to potentially stressful events, with implications for children's mental and physical health outcomes.

Children track probabilistic distributions of facial cues across individuals.

Children face a difficult task in learning how to reason about other people's emotions. How intensely facial configurations are displayed can vary not only according to what and how much emotion people are experiencing, but also across individuals based on differences in personality, gender, and culture. To navigate these sources of variability, children may use statistical information about other's facial cues to make interpretations about perceived emotions in others. We examined this possibility by testing children's ability to adjust to differences in the intensity of facial cues across different individuals. In the present study, children (6- to 10-year-olds) categorized the information communicated by facial configurations of emotion varying continuously from "calm" to "upset," with differences in the intensity of each actor's facial movements. We found that children's threshold for categorizing a facial configuration as "upset" shifted depending on the statistical information encountered about each of the different individuals. These results suggest that children are able to track individual differences in facial behavior and use these differences to flexibly update their interpretations of facial cues associated with emotion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The representation of emotion knowledge across development.

The present study examined how children spontaneously represent facial cues associated with emotion. 106 three- to six-year-old children (48 male, 58 female; 9.4% Asian, 84.0% White, 6.6% more than one race) and 40 adults (10 male, 30 female; 10% Hispanic, 30% Asian, 2.5% Black, 57.5% White) were recruited from a Midwestern city (2019-2020), and sorted emotion cues in a spatial arrangement method that assesses emotion knowledge without reliance on emotion vocabulary. Using supervised and unsupervised analyses, the study found evidence for continuities and gradual changes in children's emotion knowledge compared to adults. Emotion knowledge develops through an incremental learning process in which children change their representations using combinations of factors-particularly valence-that are weighted differently across development.

Early life stress and perceived social isolation influence how children use value information to guide behavior.

Learning the value of environmental signals and using that information to guide behavior is critical for survival. Stress in childhood may influence these processes, but how it does so is still unclear. This study examined how stressful event exposures and perceived social isolation affect the ability to learn value signals and use that information in 72 children (8-9 years; 29 girls; 65.3% White). Stressful event exposures and perceived social isolation did not influence how children learned value information. But, children with high stressful event exposures and perceived social isolation were worse at using that information. These data suggest alterations in how value information is used, rather than learned, may be one mechanism linking early experiences to later behaviors.

Testimony bias lingers across development under uncertainty.

Children have a powerful ability to track probabilistic information, but there are also situations in which young learners simply follow what another person says or does at the cost of obtaining rewards. This latter phenomenon, sometimes termed bias to trust in testimony, has primarily been studied in children preschool-age and younger, presumably because reasoning capacities improve with age. Less attention has been paid to situations in which testimony bias lingers-one possibility is that children revert to a testimony bias under conditions of uncertainty. Here, participants (4 to 9 years old) searched for rewards and received testimony that varied in reliability. We find support for testimony bias beyond preschool-age, particularly for uncertain testimony. Children were sensitive to trial-by-trial uncertainty (Experiment 1: N = 102, 59 boys, 43 girls; the sample included nine Hispanic/Latinx, 93 non-Hispanic/Latinx participants, of whom six were Black/African American, seven were Asian American, eight were multiracial, 77 were White, and four indicated "other" or did not respond), and with uncertainty defined as a one-time, unexpected change in the testimony (Experiment 3: N = 129; 68 boys, 61 girls; the sample included 12 Hispanic/Latinx, 117 non-Hispanic/Latinx [10 Black/African American, four Asian American, nine multiracial, 103 White, and three "other"]). However, the impact of the testimony bias decreased with age. These effects were specific to the testimony coming from another person as opposed to resulting from a computer glitch (Experiment 2: N = 89, 52 boys, 37 girls; five Hispanic/Latinx, 80 non-Hispanic/Latinx, of whom one was Black/African American, three were Asian American, 15 were multiracial, 66 were White, and four did not report race). Taken together, these experiments provide evidence of a disproportionate influence of testimony, even in children with more advanced reasoning skills. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).