A Review of Adversity, The Amygdala and the Hippocampus: A Consideration of Developmental Timing

By Nim Tottenham, Margaret A Sheridan. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2009

639 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A review of the human developmental neuroimaging literature that investigates outcomes following exposure to psychosocial adversity is presented with a focus on two subcortical structures – the hippocampus and the amygdala. Throughout this review, we discuss how a consideration of developmental timing of adverse experiences and age at measurement might provide insight into the seemingly discrepant findings across studies. We use findings from animal studies to suggest some mechanisms through which timing of experiences may result in differences across time and studies. The literature suggests that early life may be a time of heightened susceptibility to environmental stressors, but that expression of these effects will vary by age at measurement.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/998ecfc5a7b33ca68854deb69687d6a6b3491e21

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Citations in the corpus

Acetylcholine as a neuromodulator: cholinergic signaling shapes nervous system function and behavior (2012, background): “…in learning and memory, the amygdala in mediating fear responses and the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in attention, these brain areas are critical nodes in adaptation and responses to stress (Belujon and Grace, 2011; Gozzi et al., 2010; McGaugh, 2004; Sapolsky, 2000; Tottenham and Sheridan, 2009).”
Sensitive periods of amygdala development: The role of maltreatment in preadolescence (2014, background): “Third, the timing of adversity may be critical (Andersen et al., 2008; Tottenham and Sheridan, 2009).”
Effects of Early Life Stress on Cognitive and Affective Function: An Integrated Review of Human Literature (2010, background): “Most recently, Tottenham and Sheridan (2010) argued that hippocampal development lags behind the developmental trajectory of the amygdala.”
Behavior Problems After Early Life Stress: Contributions of the Hippocampus and Amygdala (2014, background): “However, major inconsistencies have emerged in research examining these structures in human and nonhuman samples exposed to stress (39).”
The Development of Human Amygdala Functional Connectivity at Rest from 4 to 23 Years: a cross-sectional study (2014, positive): “…of these regions that in adulthood have been associated with episodic memory, emotion, and self-related processing in concert with the amygdala (Lou et al., 2004; Luna et al., 2001; Maddock et al., 2003; Roy et al., 2009; Tottenham and Sheridan, 2009; ventral precuneus: Zhang and Li, 2012).”
Childhood Adversity and Neural Development: Deprivation and Threat as Distinct Dimensions of Early Experience (2014, background): “, effects on vmPFC), of the predictions outlined above have reviously been articulated within the literature on stress and eural development (Tottenham and Sheridan, 2009).”
Early developmental emergence of human amygdala–prefrontal connectivity after maternal deprivation (2013, background): “The timing of stress exposure and cellular properties of this circuitry may render it particularly vulnerable to early adversity (6).”