How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

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From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development

The chapter begins with a distinction made between the interactions children have with peers, the relationships they form with peers, and the groups and networks within which peer interactions and relationships occur. From this conceptual overview, a review of relevant theories is presented. Thereafter, a developmental perspective of peer interactions, relationships, and groups is presented covering the periods of infancy, toddlerhood, early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence. Subsequently, methods and measures pertaining to the study of children's peer experiences are described. Next, we examine factors that may account for peer acceptance and rejection as well as qualitatively rich and poor friendships. Among the factors discussed are included temperament (biological factors), sex of child, parenting, parent-child relationships, and culture. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the extent to which individual differences in peer acceptance, rejection and friendship (prevalence and quality) predict adaptive and maladaptive developmental outcomes and a suggested agenda for future research.


Keywords:

friendship;
peer interactions;
peer relationships;
peer rejection;
social acceptance;
social competence

Peer Interactions, Relationships, and Groups

Adolescence is a developmental period characterized by suboptimal decisions and actions that are associated with an increased incidence of unintentional injuries, violence, substance abuse, unintended pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases. Traditional neurobiological and cognitive explanations for adolescent behavior have failed to account for the nonlinear changes in behavior observed during adolescence, relative to both childhood and adulthood. This review provides a biologically plausible model of the neural mechanisms underlying these nonlinear changes in behavior. We provide evidence from recent human brain imaging and animal studies that there is a heightened responsiveness to incentives and socioemotional contexts during this time, when impulse control is still relatively immature. These findings suggest differential development of bottom-up limbic systems, implicated in incentive and emotional processing, to top-down control systems during adolescence as compared to childhood and adulthood. This developmental pattern may be exacerbated in those adolescents prone to emotional reactivity, increasing the likelihood of poor outcomes.

The Adolescent Brain

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An Introduction To The Event Related Potential Technique

Biological reactivity to psychological stressors comprises a complex, integrated, and highly conserved repertoire of central neural and peripheral neuroendocrine responses designed to prepare the organism for challenge or threat. Developmental experience plays a role, along with heritable, polygenic variation, in calibrating the response dynamics of these systems, with early adversity biasing their combined effects toward a profile of heightened or prolonged reactivity. Conventional views of such high reactivity suggest that it is an atavistic and pathogenic legacy of an evolutionary past in which threats to survival were more prevalent and severe. Recent evidence, however, indicates that (a) stress reactivity is not a unitary process, but rather incorporates counterregulatory circuits serving to modify or temper physiological arousal, and (b) the effects of high reactivity phenotypes on psychiatric and biomedical outcomes are bivalent, rather than univalent, in character, exerting both risk-augmenting and risk-protective effects in a context-dependent manner. These observations suggest that heightened stress reactivity may reflect, not simply exaggerated arousal under challenge, but rather an increased biological sensitivity to context, with potential for negative health effects under conditions of adversity and positive effects under conditions of support and protection. From an evolutionary perspective, the developmental plasticity of the stress response systems, along with their structured, context-dependent effects, suggests that these systems may constitute conditional adaptations: evolved psychobiological mechanisms that monitor specific features of childhood environments as a basis for calibrating the development of stress response systems to adaptively match those environments. Taken together, these theoretical perspectives generate a novel hypothesis: that there is a curvilinear, U-shaped relation between early exposures to adversity and the development of stress-reactive profiles, with high reactivity phenotypes disproportionately emerging within both highly stressful and highly protected early social environments.

https://cals.arizona.edu/fcs/sites/cals.arizona.edu.fcs/files/D&P%20Boyce%20&%20Ellis%202005.pdf

Biological sensitivity to context: I. An evolutionary–developmental theory of the origins and functions of stress reactivity

We examined the longitudinal relation between behavioral inhibition (BI) and social anxiety symptoms and behavior and the mediating role of emotion regulation (ER). Moreover, we investigated the influence of parenting behavior on the development of ER strategies. Participants were 291 children (135 male) followed longitudinally from 2 to 13 years. Mothers were predominantly well educated and non-Hispanic Caucasian. Children were screened for BI using maternal report and observational measures (ages 2 and 3), parenting behavior was observed while children and their mothers participated in a fear-eliciting task (age 3), ER strategies were observed while children completed a disappointment task (age 5), and socially anxious behavior was measured via multimethod assessment at 10 and 13 years. Children who exhibited high BI in early childhood exhibited more socially anxious behavior across ages 10 and 13, and there was a significant indirect effect of BI on socially anxious behavior through ER strategies. Children who were high in BI demonstrated less engaged ER strategies during the disappointment task, which in turn predicted more socially anxious behavior. Furthermore, parenting behavior moderated the pathway linking early BI and ER strategies to social anxiety outcomes such that children who exhibited high BI and who received more affectionate/oversolicitous behavior from their mother displayed less engaged ER strategies and more socially anxious behavior than children low in BI or low in oversolicitous parenting behaviors. These findings expand on our understanding of the role that ER strategies and parenting play in the developmental pathway linking early BI to future social anxiety outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Examining a developmental pathway from early behavioral inhibition to emotion regulation and social anxiety: The moderating role of parenting.

The Integration of Self and Other in the Development of Self-Regulation

We examined behavioral and electrophysiological indices of self-referential and valence processing during a Self-Referential Encoding Task in 9- to 12-year-old children, followed by surprise memory tasks for self- and other-referential trait adjectives. Participants endorsed more positive than negative self-referential information but equally endorsed positive and negative information about the other character. Children demonstrated enhanced parietal LPP amplitudes in response to self- compared to other-referential trait adjectives. Positive and negative information was differentially remembered depending on the order of the referent cues presented, suggesting that social information undergoes differential consolidation processes depending on the referent and the order of presentation.

Heather A. Henderson

Papers

Examining a developmental pathway from early behavioral inhibition to emotion regulation and social anxiety: The moderating role of parenting.

The Integration of Self and Other in the Development of Self-Regulation

The Prominence of Self-referential Processing across ERP and Memory Consolidation in Children.

Shyness and perceived monitoring by peers affect children’s performance in a divided attention task

The integration of self and other in the development of self-regulation: Typical and atypical processes