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Early Experience and Brain Development | Overview

Dr. McLaughlin is a collaborator on the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP), a study examining the impact of early experience on brain and behavioral development.  The study has followed a group of children who were raised in institutional settings in Bucharest, Romania from infancy through early adolescence. 

Half of the children raised in institutions were placed in a high-quality foster-care program developed by the study investigators.  Dr. McLaughlin is involved in assessing a variety of measures of physiological reactivity to stress in a current assessment of the children at age 12 years and has collaborated with the BEIP group on a number of projects examining the neural mechanisms linking early adversity to mental disorders in this sample. 

The principal investigators of the BEIP are Charles Nelson, Nathan Fox, and Charles Zeanah.

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