Individual differences in sensitivity to danger-alerting stimuli and fear are central to many aspects of psychopathology – high fear sensitivity is associated with anxiety disorders, low fear sensitivity with low affiliativeness and high callous-unemotional (CU) behaviours. I test the hypothesis that individual variations in sensitivity to fear arise early in ontogeny at the age when infants begin to show the first signs of behavioral sensitivity to social signals of fear. I use a sample of 400 children (belonging to the FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study) and a longitudinal design and examine, for the first time, whether the early-emerging variations in infant sensitivity to social signals of fear predict neural (EEG) and behavioral (e.g., eye-tracking) responses to fear-alerting stimuli and associated risk for psychopathology at the age of 9 years The project may have important implications for building developmentally informed models of fear sensitivity and risk for psychopathology.

2022

2026