About
Children's institutionalization remains a major intervention worldwide for children whose parents, for various reasons, are unwilling or unable to care adequately for them (UNICEF, 2010). In Portugal, 8,600 children and adolescents under the age of 18 were living in residential institutions in 2015, with the majority spending more than one year in such a placement (Instituto de Segurança Social, 2015). More than 50% of these children, above 12 years of age, show emotional and behavioral problems at a clinical level. This dramatic scenario occurs, despite the fact that decades of research have documented child's institutionalization as a multilevel deprivation experience, particularly in terms of the absence of sensitive and responsive care, contributing, therefore, to a cascade of negative developmental outcomes. In fact, the institutional context does not seem to provide the adequate environmental input necessary for normal brain development compromising children's emotional and behavioral functioning. Although progress has been made in illuminating the contextual influences on emotional and behavioral regulatory problems, the biological mechanisms by which they emerge and last throughout life, even after adoption or other interventions, remain to be fully elucidated.
Thus, this project aims to explore the mechanisms by which such adverse relational experience leads to the emergence and enduring of adolescents' emotional and behavioral regulatory problems. For this, a multi-level approach, advocated in recent literature in the field of child development will be employed in order to look at the interplay between epigenetics, brain, and behavior. It will investigate whether and how--epigenetic changes in terms of DNA methylation of a set of selected genes contribute to different patterns of brain functional connectivity, and ultimately to emotional and behavioral regulatory problems in institutionally-reared adolescents. Employing a multimodal MRI technique the brain functional connectivity of these youths will be evaluated in a resting state mode and, as well, during an emotional evocative task. The proposed research benefits from our team's expertise of studying institutional rearing, brain development, and genetics of developmental disorders. It will be conducted by a collaborative and interdisciplinary group of neuroscientists, developmental psychologists, biologists, and molecular geneticists. In addition to illuminating basic developmental processes, the proposed work will also be socially important, as it will help to design intervention programs scientifically informed.
