Early institutionalized care disrupts the development of emotion processing in prosody

Area of Science:

• Developmental Neuroscience
• Child Psychology
• Social Neuroscience

Background:

• Institutional rearing can lead to psychosocial deprivation affecting children's skills.
• Children in institutional care often exhibit deficits in recognizing facial emotions.
• Vocal emotional processing and cross-modal integration in these children remain understudied.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate emotional prosody processing and cross-modal emotional integration in children under institutional care (IC) versus biological family care (BFC).
• To examine brain responses using electroencephalography (EEG) to facial and vocal emotional cues.

Main Methods:

• EEG recordings were obtained from 47 children (20-40 months old), divided into IC (n=24) and BFC (n=23) groups.
• Participants viewed facial expressions (angry, happy, neutral) while listening to pseudowords with congruent or incongruent emotional prosody.
• Event-related potentials (ERPs) were analyzed to assess brain responses.

Main Results:

• Children in IC demonstrated less sensitive midfrontal ERPs to incongruent facial and prosodic emotions compared to BFC children.
• Brain responses to prosody were less lateralized in children under IC.
• Institutionalized children showed distinct midfrontal ERPs when processing angry prosody, suggesting specific deficits.

Conclusions:

• Institutional rearing is associated with altered neural processing of integrated emotional cues in early childhood.
• Children in institutional care may have specific difficulties processing vocal anger cues.
• Findings highlight potential long-term impacts of institutional environments on socio-emotional brain development.