Megan R. Gunnar, Camelia E. Hostinar, Mar M. Sanchez, Nim Tottenham & Regina M. Sullivan (2015): Parental buffering of fear and stress neurobiology: Reviewing parallels across rodent, monkey, and human models, Social Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1080/17470919.2015.1070198

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470919.2015.1070198

It has been long recognized that parents exert profound influences on child development. Dating back to at least the seventeenth-century Enlightenment, the ability for parents to shape child behavior in an enduring way has been noted. Twentieth-century scholars developed theories to explain how parenting histories influence psychological development, and since that time, the number of scientific publications on parenting influences in both human and nonhuman animal fields has grown at an exponential rate, reaching numbers in the thousands by 2015. This special issue describes a symposium delivered by Megan Gunnar, Regina Sullivan, Mar Sanchez, and Nim Tottenham in the Fall of 2014 at the Society for Social Neuroscience. The goal of the symposium was to describe the emerging knowledge on neurobiological mechanisms that mediate parent–offspring interactions across three different species: rodent, monkey, and human. The talks were aimed at designing testable models of parenting effects on the development of emotional and stress regulation. Specifically, the symposium aimed at characterizing the special modulatory (buffering) effects of parental cues on fear- and stress-relevant neurobiology and behaviors of the offspring and to discuss examples of impaired buffering when the parent–infant relationship is disrupted.

Keywords: Parents; Social buffering; Fear; Stress; Amygdala; Prefrontal cortex.

gunnar2015 (5).pdf

Steven A. Hoffman, David Wm. Shucard y Ronald J. Harbeck

Abstract: Evidence is presented that the immune system can affect central nervous system functioning, leading to changes in learning. Immune complex disease is induced in rats and their behavior tested using a Lashley maze. Significant differences in behavior were found between the animals with high disease activity and those with low disease activity and the non-disease controls. These changes were not due to uremia and are most likely due to the immune response. There is some evidence immune complex deposits in the choroid plexus may play some role, but not the sole or major role in the behavioral changes. This provides a model by which immunologic processes can cause neuropsychiatric manifestations in autoimmune diseases like lupus, as well as showing that immune processes can affect behavioral functioning. q 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Neuro-immune interactions; Immune complex disease; Systemic lupus erythematosus; Behavior; Memory and learning

hoffman1998.pdf

Camelia E. Hostinar, Ph.D. and Megan R. Gunnar, Ph.D. Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota

Abstract: The field of psychobiology has two major theories for talking about stress and health: the allostatic load model, which grew out of biological and neuroscience approaches to understanding health and disease, and the adaptive calibration model, which developed out of an explicitly evolutionary-developmental framework. Both are based on assumptions that the brain coordinates a distributed and dynamic set of neural circuits that regulate behavior and stress physiology to help the organism adapt to the demands of the environment. Both models support the notion that experiences early in life are embedded into the regulation of stress systems in ways that shape the organism’s future responses. These two paradigms differ in their emphasis on whether changes in how stress systems function are viewed as adaptive or maladaptive. The goal of this review is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each framework and to discuss some implications for future studies and for policy.

nihms626418.pdf