More than 1.5 million children were victims of substantiated child maltreatment in the United States last year. One concern is that while we have identified a heightened rate of behavioral disorders associated with such traumatic experience in these children, the mechanisms linking these children's emotional experiences with the later development of psychopathology remain largely unknown. Understanding the processes by which experience alters developing regulatory systems may provide insights into the development of psychopathology. The proposed research will characterize cognitive electrophysiological differences in children's processing of emotion that are not observable from overt behavioral responses alone. I propose to determine if and how child maltreatment affects children's perceptual processing of emotional information by: (1) Measuring maltreated children's sensitivity to auditory affective cues. Event-related potentials (ERPS) will record information processing as children listen to effectively charged words, presented dichotically. 2) Isolating the effects of emotion on maltreated children's attentional processes, ERPs will be used to determine the effect of emotional cues on children's attentional control and on attentional resource allocation in response to facial displays of emotion and emotional sounds. (3) Determining whether maltreatment affects children's perceptual organization of emotional information. Children will make perceptual categorization judgments of facial expressions of affect that have been digitally blended with other emotions. (4) Assessing differences in affective chronometry among maltreated children. Since transmission of emotion occurs very quickly, most tasks that require behavioral responses may not be sensitive to temporal aspects of information processing. This experiment will measure maltreated children's responses to dynamically unfolding perceptual information about facial expressions without reliance on reaction time measures. Taken together, these studies will extend knowledge about the development of psychopathology in maltreated children by focusing upon specific perceptual and cognitive processes through which aberrant experience affects subsequent affective functioning. In addition, studying the effects of maltreatment in this manner will shed light on the mechanisms contributing to the developmental organization of emotion systems. Because dysregulation of affect is common to so many forms of child psychopathology, insights generated with regard to the neuro-behavioral processes associated with maltreated children's behavior may help explicate pathways of both adaptive and maladaptive development.
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