Anxiety disorders are the most common form of mental illness and are more likely to emerge during childhood compared with most other psychiatric disorders. While research on children is the gold standard for understanding the behavioral expression of anxiety and its neural circuitry, the ethical and technical limitations in exploring neural underpinnings limit our understanding of the child's developing brain. Instead, we must rely on animal models to build strong methodological bridges for bidirectional translation to child development research. Using the caregiver-infant context, we review the rodent literature on early-life fear development to characterize developmental transitions in amygdala function underlying age-specific behavioral transitions. We then describe how this system can be perturbed by early-life adversity, including reduced efficacy of the caregiver as a safe haven. We suggest that greater integration of clinically informed animal research enhances bidirectional translation to permit new approaches to therapeutics for children with early onset anxiety disorders.

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婴儿恐惧和焦虑的神经生物学：杏仁核发育延迟和依恋图质量的影响

焦虑症是最常见的精神疾病形式，与大多数其他精神疾病相比，更容易在儿童时期出现。虽然对儿童的研究是理解焦虑行为表达及其神经回路的黄金标准，但探索神经基础的伦理和技术限制限制了我们对儿童大脑发育的理解。相反，我们必须依靠动物模型为儿童发展研究的双向转化建立强大的方法学桥梁。使用照顾者-婴儿的背景，我们回顾了关于早期恐惧发展的啮齿动物文献，以描述杏仁核功能的发育转变，这些转变是特定年龄行为转变的基础。然后，我们描述了这个系统如何受到早年逆境的干扰，包括降低看护者作为避风港的功效。我们建议，临床知情动物研究的更大整合可增强双向转化，从而为患有早发性焦虑症的儿童提供新的治疗方法。