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Complex and coordinated brain development progresses rapidly within the first year of a baby’s life, and infant white matter development is associated with future cognitive processes and behavioral problems. Elucidating the neural basis of infant emotional behaviors can identify biomarkers of pathophysiological risk for subsequent behavioral and emotional problems. 

In Biological Psychiatry, investigators including Layla Banihashemi, PhD (Associate Professor of Psychiatry); Michele Bertocci, PhD (Assistant Professor of Psychiatry); João Paulo Lima Santos, MD (Research Instructor in Psychiatry); Amelia Versace, MD (Associate Professor of Psychiatry); Jessie Northrup, PhD (Assistant Professor of Psychiatry); and the study’s principal investigators Alison Hipwell, PhD, PsyD (Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology); and Mary Phillips, MD, MD (Cantab) (Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry, Clinical and Translational Science, and Bioengineering, and Pittsburgh Foundation-Emmerling Endowed Chair in Psychotic Disorders), used multimodal neuroimaging to study how functional interactions among large-scale networks influence white matter microstructural-emotional behavior relationships in infants. Study participants comprised 52 caregiver/infant dyads. At three months, infants underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), caregivers provided reports of infant emotional behavior, and caregiver affect was assessed.

The study found that relationships between the morphology of key white matter tracts within large-scale networks important for emotional regulation and early emotional behavior are influenced by underlying resting-state functional connectivity. Greater cingulum bundle volume was significantly associated with lower positive emotionality; however, an adaptive pattern of lower resting-state functional connectivity between central executive network and default mode network structures suppressed this relationship and was associated with greater positive emotionality. Greater uncinate fasciculus volume was significantly associated with lower negative emotionality; however, lower orbitofrontal cortex -amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex-default mode network resting-state functional connectivity suppressed this relationship, while greater orbitofrontal cortex-central executive network resting-state functional connectivity mediated this relationship.

“Our findings in 3-month-old infants show that patterns of connectivity between large-scale networks are important influences on relationships between the structural scaffolding of the white matter and emotional behaviors,” said Dr. Banihashemi, the paper’s lead author. “It is fascinating that the way in which brain-behavior relationships represent integrations of different neural modalities emerges so early in infancy. These findings have implications for neural risk for or resilience against emotional dysregulation throughout childhood and beyond. This underscores the importance of early identification of neural markers of emotional dysregulation that can guide interventions modulating these structure-function relationships to reduce risk for behavioral health problems later in life.” 

Neural network functional interactions mediate or suppress white matter–emotional behavior relationships in infants
Banihashemi L, Schmithorst VJ, Bertocci MA, Samolyk A, Zhang Y, Lima Santos JP, Versace A, Taylor M, English G, Northrup JB, Lee VK, Stiffler R, Aslam R, Panigrahy A, Hipwell AE, Phillips ML.
Biological Psychiatry Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 July 2023, Pages 57-67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2023.03.004