Publications by authors named "Nuria K Mackes"
Article Synopsis
- Early childhood neglect can lead to significant long-term impacts on brain development, specifically noted in reduced total brain volume in adulthood following severe institutional deprivation.
- Researchers analyzed brain imaging data from young adults who experienced this deprivation and found that it was linked to smaller volumes in specific white matter tracts, including key association fibers and limbic circuitry.
- While volumetric changes were observed, the study indicated that microstructural organization of these tracts remained unaffected, suggesting that environmental enrichment post-adoption does not reverse the volumetric decline caused by early neglect.
Background: Institutional deprivation in early childhood is associated with neuropsychological deficits in adolescence. Using 20-year follow-up data from a unique natural experiment - the large-scale adoption of children exposed to extreme deprivation in Romanian institutions in the 1980s -we examined, for the first time, whether such deficits are still present in adulthood and whether they are associated with deprivation-related symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Methods: Adult neuropsychological functioning was assessed across five domains (inhibitory control, emotion recognition, decision-making, prospective memory and IQ) in 70 previously institutionalized adoptees (mean age = 25.
Early childhood deprivation is associated with alterations in adult brain structure despite subsequent environmental enrichment.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
January 2020
Early childhood deprivation is associated with higher rates of neurodevelopmental and mental disorders in adulthood. The impact of childhood deprivation on the adult brain and the extent to which structural changes underpin these effects are currently unknown. To investigate these questions, we utilized MRI data collected from young adults who were exposed to severe deprivation in early childhood in the Romanian orphanages of the Ceaușescu era and then, subsequently adopted by UK families; 67 Romanian adoptees (with between 3 and 41 mo of deprivation) were compared with 21 nondeprived UK adoptees.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany empathy tasks lack ecological validity due to their use of simplistic stimuli and static analytical approaches. Empathic accuracy tasks overcome these limitations by using autobiographical emotional video clips. Usually, a single measure of empathic accuracy is computed by correlating the participants' continuous ratings of the narrator's emotional state with the narrator's own ratings.
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