Back on June 21st, 2010, we reported on an LOI (letter of intent) from Karlen Lyons-Ruth, an attachment researcher working at the Cambridge Health Alliance. As a result of Dr. Lyons-Ruth’s LOI, the Foundation invited a Full Application. With Dr. Lyons-Ruth’s permission, we are reproducing two sections from the Full Application that was submitted. We found both sections to be most informative and thought we’d pass the information along to you our blog readers (hyperlinks have been added):
Activites/Goal—Severe early parenting disruptions associated with infant disorganization have been associated with suicidality, impulsive, self-damaging features of borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder features, and dissociation. Based on studies showing that early life stress can interfere with brain development, it is to be expected that the emotion regulation difficulties associated with attachment disorganization are accompanied by structural and functional changes in the brain. This proposed project merges two disciplines—developmental psychology and medical neuroscience—to advance our understanding of the long-term consequences of disrupted parenting and disorganized attachment. It is our goal to investigate how early disrupted parenting and disorganized attachment affect (a.) volumetric structure and (b.) functional reactivity of brain regions involved in emotional processing. One of the key brain regions involved in responding to emotional stimuli is the amygdala. At birth, the amygdala is present in its basic cytoarchitecture and function but develops rapidly in the months after birth. Disruptions in its developmental trajectory are likely to alter thresholds to emotional information and therefore contribute to later psychopathology. However, as the amygdala is undergoing critical change very early in life, research cannot rely on retrospective reports to report adversity during this period. For the proposed project, we are able to recruit participants from Dr. Lyons-Ruth’s prospective study of 76 families investigating attachment and quality of early care. Families were videotaped interacting with their infants at 18 months of age in standardized assessments paradigms. Our project therefore provides a unique opportunity to learn how early disruption in parenting and disorganized attachment may affect brain regions involved in emotional regulation and how such impairments contribute to the progression of mood and anxiety-based disorders.
Social Problem Addressed—In the United States alone, 3.7 million children underwent an investigation by Child Protective Services in 2008. Over a quarter (26.3%) of these children were 2 years or younger of which the majority (78.5-81.5%) experienced some form of neglect (US Department of Health and Human Services 2010). Moreover, recent prospective studies have indicated that serious deviating in the minute-to-minute quality of parent-child interaction over time is a great risk factor for young adult psychopathology (Dutra, Bureau, Holmes, Lyubchik, & Lyons-Ruth, 2009). In a longitudinal study on attachment and early parenting, it was found that emotional withdrawal by the mother in the early interaction with the infant increased the risk self-damaging, impulsive, and antisocial behavior as well as suicidality in young adulthood (Lyons-Ruth et al., 2009). Moreover, Dr. Teicher and his colleagues (2003, 2006, 2010) demonstrated that episodes of early life stress (verbal, emotional, sexual or physical abuse) can disrupt development of those brain regions undergoing critical development at the time. These two lines of research indicate that early parenting disruptions may have severe psychological and neurobiological long-term consequences. Despite the pressing need to improve our understanding of these mechanisms, so far this is a vastly understudied area mainly due to difficulties of retrospectively evaluating early mother-infant interactions. The proposed project’s longitudinal design would allow us to be the first research study to assess the impact of disorganized attachment and disrupted parenting on brain development prospectively in an attempt to explain pathways leading to emotional dysfunction in later life. We believe that studying the impact of early mother-infant relationships on brain development will help to raise awareness of the significance of attachment-related issues in early life and prove pivotal in catalyzing early interventions to limit such serious sequelae.
