HOW TO BREAK THE VICIOUS CYCLE OF VIOLENCE IN EARLY CHILDHOOD: INTEGRATING RECENT ADVANCES IN NEUROSCIENCE AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH

Objectives: The goal of this session is to bring together four presentations of original infant psychiatry research that are focused on the interplay of risk and resilience factors contributing to the intergenerational transmission of maltreatment and violence and on the interruption of that transmission through relationship-based intervention. Methods: Four interdisciplinary panel members (a developmental psychologist, a pediatrician, and two child psychiatrists who are developmental neuroscientists) will present original clinical research that will be followed by a bench developmental neuroscientist's integrative discussion and audience participation. Results: Dr. Archana Basu will present findings that mothers' mental representations of their toddlers are associated with child-internalizing and externalizing symptoms and mediate the effects of maternal PTSD. Dr. Nina Burtchen will present findings that similarly at risk mothers' interactive behavior with their infants predicts infant difficulties and perceived "fussiness." Dr. Daniel S. Schechter will present findings that maternal mentalizing capacity and its neural correlates are associated with less severe child psychopathology at baseline and 1 year later. Dr. James E. Swain will present findings from a pre- and postintervention fMRI study of maltreated mothers and infants that show changes in neural activity associated with decreased parenting stress. Dr. Regina M. Sullivan will integrate these presentations with pertinent findings in rodent models and translate the discussion back to clinical implications. Conclusions: This symposium brings together clinical research involving clinically useful methods of parent-infant relationship assessment. It demonstrates the importance of the interplay between maternal mental representations, observed parent-child interactions, attachment-based reflective functioning, and their neural correlates to confer risk and resilience, as well as change following psychotherapeutic treatment, that can affect how we treat high risk families to interrupt cycles of violence and abuse during infancy and early childhood.