Early Development of Fear Processing

Considerable advances have been made in understanding how emotional information is coded in the brain and used in the service of adaptive behavior, yet the developmental origins of these processes remain relatively unexamined. In this article, we review recent studies in human infants and experimental animals that have highlighted the importance of the first years of life in the development of emotion-processing capacities, particularly the ability to respond preferentially to threat-alerting stimuli. We discuss mechanisms that might govern the development of these capacities and suggest directions for further research into the nature and functional significance of infants' early-emerging biases in the perception of emotional information.