ArticleSocial neuroscience2015
Mechanisms and functional implications of social buffering in infants: Lessons from animal models.
Article in Social neuroscience, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers.
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Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed, 51 citations in OpenAlex.
- Maternal separation increases anxiety-like phenotypes, fear responses, and altersNeurobiology of stress · 2026Article
- Social Buffering of Acute Early Life Stress Sex-Dependently Ameliorates Fear Incubation in Adulthood.Developmental psychobiology · 2025Article
- Dissociative symptoms in school-aged adopted children who experienced maternal separation and disruptive caregiving in infancy.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Reconsidering the nature of threat in infancy: Integrating animal and human studies on neurobiological effects of infant stress.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2024Review
- Characterizing the mechanisms of social connection.Neuron · 2023Review
- Dynamic developmental changes in neurotransmitters supporting infant attachment learning.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- The stress-buffering role of friendships in young people with childhood threat experiences: a preliminary report.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2023Article
- Age-related change in task-evoked amygdala-prefrontal circuitry: A multiverse approach with an accelerated longitudinal cohort aged 4-22 years.Human brain mapping · 2022Article
- Systematic Input-Output Mapping Reveals Structural Plasticity of VTA Dopamine Neurons-Zona Incerta Loop Underlying the Social Buffering Effects in Learned Helplessness.Molecular neurobiology · 2022Article
- Infant Attachment and Social Modification of Stress Neurobiology.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2021Review
- Why Psychotropic Drugs Don't Cure Mental Illness-But Should They?Frontiers in psychiatry · 2021Article
- Elevated infant cortisol is necessary but not sufficient for transmission of environmental risk to infant social development: Cross-species evidence of mother-infant physiological social transmission.Development and psychopathology · 2020Article
- Is there evidence for sensitive periods in emotional development?Current opinion in behavioral sciences · 2020Article
- Article
- During infant maltreatment, stress targets hippocampus, but stress with mother present targets amygdala and social behavior.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Neural signatures of child cognitive emotion regulation are bolstered by parental social regulation in two cultures.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2019Article
- Moving Closer to Isolating Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Resilience to Anxiety in Youth With Early Childhood Adversity.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2019Article
- Developing a neurobehavioral animal model of poverty: Drawing cross-species connections between environments of scarcity-adversity, parenting quality, and infant outcome.Development and psychopathology · 2019Article
- Socioeconomic risk moderates the association between caregiver cortisol levels and infant cortisol reactivity to emotion induction at 24 months.Developmental psychobiology · 2019Article
- Infant Trauma Alters Social Buffering of Threat Learning: Emerging Role of Prefrontal Cortex in Preadolescence.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Social buffering, which is the attenuation of stress hormone release by a social partner, occurs in many species throughout the lifespan. Social buffering of the infant by the caregiver is particularly robust, and animal models using infant rodents are uncovering the mechanisms and neural circuitry supporting social buffering. At birth, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) stress system is functional but is suppressed via extended social buffering by the mother: the profound social buffering effects of the mother can last for 1-2 hours when pups are removed from the mother. At 10 days of age, pups begin to mount a stress response immediately when separated from the mother. The stimuli from the mother supporting social buffering are broad, for tactile stimulation, milk, and an anesthetized mother (no maternal behavior) all sufficiently support social buffering. The mother appears to produce social buffering by blocking norepinephrine (NE) release into the hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus (PVN), which blocks HPA activation. Since the infant amygdala relies on the presence of corticosterone (CORT), this suggests that social buffering of pups by the mother attenuates the neurobehavioral stress response in infancy and prevents pups from learning about threat within mother-infant interactions.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.