Millions of children worldwide are raised in institutionalized settings. Unfortunately, institutionalized rearing is often characterized by psychosocial deprivation, leading to difficulties in numerous social, emotional, physical, and cognitive skills. One such skill is the ability to recognize emotional facial expressions. Children with a history of institutional rearing tend to be worse at recognizing emotions in facial expressions than their peers, and this deficit likely affects social interactions. However, emotional information is also conveyed vocally, and neither prosodic information processing nor the cross-modal integration of facial and prosodic emotional expressions have been investigated in these children to date. We recorded electroencephalograms (EEG) while 47 children under institutionalized care (IC) (n = 24) or biological family care (BFC) (n = 23) viewed angry, happy, or neutral facial expressions while listening to pseudowords with angry, happy, or neutral prosody. The results indicate that 20- to 40-month-olds living in IC have event-related potentials (ERPs) over midfrontal brain regions that are less sensitive to incongruent facial and prosodic emotions relative to children under BFC, and that their brain responses to prosody are less lateralized. Children under IC also showed midfrontal ERP differences in processing of angry prosody, indicating that institutionalized rearing may specifically affect the processing of anger.

中文翻译：

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早期的制度化护理破坏了韵律中情绪处理的发展

全世界数以百万计的儿童在机构化环境中长大。不幸的是，制度化的养育往往以社会心理剥夺为特征，导致许多社交、情感、身体和认知技能方面的困难。其中一项技能是识别情绪面部表情的能力。与同龄人相比，有机构抚养历史的儿童在识别面部表情中的情绪方面往往更差，这种缺陷可能会影响社交互动。然而，情感信息也是通过声音传达的，迄今为止，尚未对这些儿童的韵律信息处理和面部和韵律情感表达的跨模态整合进行研究。我们记录了 47 名接受机构照料 (IC) 的儿童的脑电图 (EEG) (n= 24) 或生物家庭护理 (BFC) (n= 23) 在听具有愤怒、快乐或中性韵律的伪词时，查看愤怒、快乐或中性的面部表情。结果表明，与 BFC 下的儿童相比，生活在 IC 中的 20 至 40 个月大的儿童在大脑中额区域具有事件相关电位 (ERP)，这些区域对不一致的面部和韵律情绪不太敏感，并且他们的大脑对韵律的反应较少偏侧化。IC 下的儿童在处理愤怒韵律方面也表现出中额叶 ERP 差异，这表明制度化抚养可能特别影响愤怒的处理。