Parental buffering of fear and stress neurobiology: reviewing parallels across rodent, monkey, and human models
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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.
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Early environmental factors, such as early caregiving or the lack thereof, modulate the timing and course of emotional development.
“A comprehensive set of literature reviews (9, 32, 78, 83–86) details the hypothesis that early environmental factors, e.g., early caregiving or the lack thereof, modulate the timing and course of emotional development.”
From The Stress Acceleration Hypothesis of Nightmares (2017) · cites this paper as [32]
Infants begin to exhibit dampened cortisol reactivity during the first year of life (6-12 months).
“Studies show that infants begin to exhibit dampened cortisol reactivity during the first year of life (6–12 months) (Gunnar and Donzella, 2002, Gunnar et al., 2015).”
From Early life adversity during the infant sensitive period for attachment: Programming of behavioral neurobiology of threat processing and social behavior (2017) · cites this paper as Gunnar et al., 2015
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References 43 · Cited by 158
- Authors
- Gunnar, M. R., Hostinar, C. E., Sanchez, M. M., Tottenham, N., & Sullivan, R. M.
- Affiliations
- University of Minnesota (US)
- Northwestern University (US)
- Columbia University (US)
- Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research (US)
- Corresponding author
- Tottenham, Nim
- Venue
- Social Neuroscience
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2015-08-25
- Volume
- 10
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 474-478
- ISSN
- 1747-0919 (ISSN-L)
- 1747-0927
- PMC
- PMC5198892
- OpenAlex
- W1896053654
- Cited by
- 158
- References
- 43
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 17 · 2022: 10 · 2021: 23 · 2020: 23 · 2019: 19 · 2018: 11 · 2017: 14 · 2016: 10 · 2015: 1
- FWCI
- 1.71
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Social Neuroscience (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institute of Mental Health (MH078105)
- Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (Child and Brain Development Program)
- National Science Foundation (BSC 1439258)
- National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (F32 MH078048)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Neuroendocrine regulation and behavior
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Behavioral Neuroscience › Stress Responses and Cortisol
- Keywords
- fear regulation, stress regulation, parent-offspring interactions, emotional development, rodent models, monkey model, human models, cross-species comparison
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Haplorhini, Biological Evolution, Fear, Humans, Neurobiology, Parent-Child Relations, Parents, Stress, Psychological
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