Several of the family factors that are associated with poorer child emotion regulation involve a child's exposure to anger. Individual differences in anger processing may help to explain why family risk factors such as inter- parental anger are associated with poorer self-regulation. Although there is behavioral evidence that helps us understand children's sensitivity to and knowledge of anger, the only research involving neural processing of anger has been done with adults or in a few cases with infants. This application is aimed at understanding how children, ages 5 and 6 years, process angry prosody at the neural level. Children's patterns of brain activation when hearing angry, sad, happy, and neutral prosody are examined using fMRI technology. In addition, this project examines whether the processing of affective prosody, particularly angry prosody, is influenced by the child's familiariy with the speaker, by comparing prosody spoken by the child's mother or an unfamiliar female. The findings of this project would inform basic affective neuroscience by including research on young children and would provide a method for subsequent studies of individual differences in typical and at risk children's processing of angry prosody.
Little is known about how children's brains respond when they hear anger in an adult's voice. This study examines which areas of a child's brain are active when they hear emotion in the voice, whether anger activates distinct areas relative to other emotions (joy, sadness), and whether the activation is greater when the emotion is spoken by the child's mother compared to the voice of an unfamiliar female. Knowing this information will help us understand why there are associations between being exposed to anger in the home and a child's having poorer skills at managing emotion.
