Biological perspectives on the effects of early psychosocial experience

详细信息    查看全文

• 作者：Peter J. Marshall ; Justin W. Kenney
• 关键词：Early experience ; Neuroscience ; Institutionalization ; Development ; Biology
• 刊名：Developmental Review
• 出版年：2009
• 出版时间：June 2009
• 年：2009
• 卷：29
• 期：2
• 页码：96-119
• 全文大小：291 K

文摘

There is much current interest in how adverse experiences early in life might affect certain elements of physiological, behavioral, and psychological functioning across the lifespan. Recent conceptual frameworks for studying the effects of early experience have involved constructs such as experience-expectant, experience-dependent, and experience-adaptive plasticity. The latter construct is related to comparative models of developmental programming which posit the persistence of biological adjustments to the early caregiving environment. We briefly review such models and their translational implications. We then turn to human development and focus on the effects of large changes in children’s life courses as tests of hypotheses related to early experience effects. In particular, the effect of early institutionalization on children’s brain and behavioral development after changes to adoptive families or foster care is used as an example of a research area in which programming hypotheses have been proposed.