Early institutionalized care disrupts the development of emotion processing in prosody

Millions of children worldwide are raised in institutionalized settings. Unfortunately, institutionalized rearing is often characterized by psychosocial deprivation, leading to difficulties in numerous social, emotional, physical, and cognitive skills. One such skill is the ability to recognize emot...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Development and psychopathology 2021-05, Vol.33 (2), p.421-430
Main Authors: Chinn, Lisa K., Ovchinnikova, Irina, Sukmanova, Anastasia A., Davydova, Aleksandra O., Grigorenko, Elena L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age
Babies
Brain research
Caregivers
Children
Cognitive ability
EEG
Electroencephalography
Emotions
Event-related potentials
Eye contact
Information processing
Institutionalization
Neurosciences
Sensory integration
Social interactions
Special Issue Article
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Summary:Millions of children worldwide are raised in institutionalized settings. Unfortunately, institutionalized rearing is often characterized by psychosocial deprivation, leading to difficulties in numerous social, emotional, physical, and cognitive skills. One such skill is the ability to recognize emotional facial expressions. Children with a history of institutional rearing tend to be worse at recognizing emotions in facial expressions than their peers, and this deficit likely affects social interactions. However, emotional information is also conveyed vocally, and neither prosodic information processing nor the cross-modal integration of facial and prosodic emotional expressions have been investigated in these children to date. We recorded electroencephalograms (EEG) while 47 children under institutionalized care (IC) (n = 24) or biological family care (BFC) (n = 23) viewed angry, happy, or neutral facial expressions while listening to pseudowords with angry, happy, or neutral prosody. The results indicate that 20- to 40-month-olds living in IC have event-related potentials (ERPs) over midfrontal brain regions that are less sensitive to incongruent facial and prosodic emotions relative to children under BFC, and that their brain responses to prosody are less lateralized. Children under IC also showed midfrontal ERP differences in processing of angry prosody, indicating that institutionalized rearing may specifically affect the processing of anger.
ISSN:0954-5794
1469-2198
DOI:10.1017/S0954579420002023