Neurobiology of Infant Fear and Anxiety: Impacts of Delayed Amygdala Development and Attachment Figure Quality

Anxiety disorders are the most common form of mental illness and are more likely to emerge during childhood compared with most other psychiatric disorders. While research on children is the gold standard for understanding the behavioral expression of anxiety and its neural circuitry, the ethical and technical limitations in exploring neural underpinnings limit our understanding of the child’s developing brain. Instead, we must rely on animal models to build strong methodological bridges for bidirectional translation to child development research. Using the caregiver–infant context, we review the rodent literature on early-life fear development to characterize developmental transitions in amygdala function underlying age-specific behavioral transitions. We then describe how this system can be perturbed by early-life adversity, including reduced efficacy of the caregiver as a safe haven. We suggest that greater integration of clinically informed animal research enhances bidirectional translation to permit new approaches to therapeutics for children with early onset anxiety disorders.