Authors
Jessica E Shackman, AB Wismer Fries, SETH D Pollak
Publication date
2008
Journal
Handbook of developmental cognitive neuroscience
Volume
2
Pages
869-881
Publisher
MIT Press
Description
The past decade has witnessed a burgeoning of research activity with rodents and nonhuman primates aimed at examining how complex sets of neural networks are shaped and refined by environmental experience (Kaufman et al., 2000; Sánchez, 2006). Recent insights regarding the plasticity of neural systems, coupled with an interest in the effects of early experience on behavioral and brain development, have highlighted how adopting a developmental neuroscience perspective can not only advance basic science about cognitive and affective development, but also inform the study of risk, recovery, and resilience in children (Black et al., 1998; Cicchetti and Curtis, 2006; Pollak, 2005). Of course, it is rarely practical or ethical to experimentally manipulate major aspects of children’s life experiences. For this reason, researchers have increasingly focused on children who have been subjected to species-atypical experiences such as various forms of child maltreatment. Such humanitarian tragedies provide unprecedented opportunities, both to generally advance understanding about human brain-behavioral development and also to inform and motivate interventions for vulnerable children. These types of studies with human children are motivated by research with nonhuman animals, which have shown that adverse parental care shapes the development of the neural systems that underlie patterns of emotional and cognitive processing (Heim, Plotsky, and Nemeroff, 2004; Meaney, 2001). In this chapter we discuss some of the difficulties that have been observed in children who have experienced early maltreatment and consider the …
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